What's your privacy worth?

Local writer and Internet expert Uyless Black focused this week specifically on the Apple vs. FBI argument but asked an even bigger question: What’s our First Amendment-ensured privacy worth compared to our security?

While our Founding Fathers saw well out into the future, they could not have imagined the worlds that now exist behind billions of passwords. These worlds are being recreated every day through the Internet, a great tool, yes, but also a weapon with unprecedented power. Many of us are trying to figure out what access to these password-protected worlds — our most important work, our personal relationships with others, maybe even our secret forays into forbidden lands on the ‘net — is worth.

A lot, you say? Well, how much? Are you unwilling to sacrifice any of your priceless privacy if that position means you risk losing it all?

In his 2015 book “Lights Out,” journalist Ted Koppel shares an illustration that came from a Massachusetts lawmaker. Keep in mind that Koppel, and the Democratic lawmaker, are ardent supporters of free speech and the privacy inherent in free speech. But they are also realists when they look at the way the world is changing so dangerously, so rapidly.

In that illustration, the mother of a 13-year-old Googles for information on anorexia. Google, you understand, delivers ads customized to readers based on their searches. The mother wants Google to stop re-marketing anorexia information to a child who’s already sick, and in the illustration, Google says it doesn’t want rules that would inhibit its ability to gather information on every person and re-market it for profit. Yet when the government says it wants that information, not to make a profit but to protect the country, the big search engines cry foul — they don’t want to release that information.

How we go forward, and where we draw the line between privacy and security, must be rigorously debated because in this new world, even our smallest enemies can forever alter the trajectory of our lives like never before.

Here’s food for thought from Mr. Koppel, a good beginning in this important debate:

“If we insist too adamantly on protecting privacy, we will sacrifice both free enterprise and security. In the age of the Internet, privacy is at risk no matter what we do. What’s at issue is whether we are prepared to surrender some of our privacy to our own intelligence agencies in order to protect against even greater intrusions from a growing array of external enemies. Until the general public is made to understand the scope of the actual threat, the natural inclination will be to preserve what we know and value, against what we still suspect may never happen.”