Something I hear more and more lately is the idea that privacy is dead. And I hear this primarily from friends in the tech industry. Personally I find the sentiment very problematic for a few reasons that I would like to outline here.

First of all, I think it's pretty clear that there is a possibility that privacy as such is dead. But that depends on how you define privacy, and also how you define dead. But more importantly, irrespective of those definitions, the bigger question is whether it is helpful to say that privacy is dead. My contention is that it is possible to save privacy, but for us to do that we need to make sure to not abandon hope. And if we as technologists abandon any hope that we can save privacy that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What leads people to say that privacy is dead? The fundamental reasons are pervasive surveillance, private information as a business model, and paranoia about the general state of technology.

The pervasive surveillance is clearly all around us. We know that cell phones are location tracked most of the time. We know that everyone's unencrypted traffic is trawled for keywords, all unencrypted "metadata" saved away and all encrypted data saved away. But in itself, this shouldn't cause despair. These are all issues that can be solved with enough technical ingenuity and a bit of political will. Mass surveillance is a matter of cost and can definitely be dealt with.

The more problematic problem is how most of the Internet is currently funded with private information. Companies such as Google, Facebook and many others get almost all their revenue from ads - and these ads are more effective the more targeted they are to a specific person. But once again, there are alternative business models. It doesn't have to be like this. It does seem like the situation is similar to the oil market. We all know it can't go on forever, but the companies are making so much money out of it, that there is no incentive to change. However, there are companies that are working on privacy preserving ads, and business models that aren't even based on ad-revenue. A big part of this could also be solved if we start thinking about some of the big resources as common goods - maybe government funding is the right answer to some of these problems.

One of the biggest problems is our current lack of quality technology. Basically every protocol and every implementation we have is completely riddled with holes. For many of us, it is sometimes hard to feel optimistic about fixing this aspect of the software industry. What can we do when the state of development rests on millions and millions of bugs in all the software we use day to day - bugs that can in many cases be exploited to attack us in a myriad of ways. This to me is the most critical problem to fix - we need to change the strata of the Internet from quicksand to bedrock. But it is possible - we can do it, as long as we technologists take responsibility and adopt decentralization, open source and encryption on every level.

Together, these three issues are of course huge. But they are not insurmountable. We can get over this if we want.