On March 24, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, revealed that he had been added to a Signal group chat with various top members of the United States military and high-ranking government officials. While he was in this group chat, the members discussed issues of national security, including actual war plans. 

To be clear, what happened here was not a hack. It was not an operation by a foreign adversary to uncover top-secret national security communications. It wasn’t an elaborate spy ring. It was simply human error — in the most callous, apathetic and careless way possible. 

It is one thing for me to accidentally text a picture of a boy to my group project group chat instead of to my sister; it is a completely different thing to accidentally send war plans to a journalist.

“Signalgate,” as this controversy has been called, is the logical conclusion after decades of life on an insecure internet. As much as Signalgate was absurd, it was also inevitable. When people exist in a system that makes privacy feel impossible, who will prioritize it?

Our disregard for privacy on the iInternet can be traced back to its humble beginnings. A research project, created by and for a close group of academics with deep trust in each other. 

Instead of trying to create a system that could protect information, they wanted to create a system that could share information as easily as possible, like a house with no doors. However, when the internet became a broadly accessible tool, this did not change. There are now 6 billion people in this house with no doors.

Privacy has become devalued in American society. This recent controversy exemplifies how little people care about the security of their online actions. Although this instance was more egregious than many people would behave, decades of operating on an insecure internet have led to the devaluing of privacy within modern life. 

It is ironic that this conversation has sprung up around our officials’ use of Signal, an end-to-end encrypted communications platform that is generally considered highly secure. Our residual apathy around privacy leads us to make careless mistakes, making even the most secure systems useless when the people using them don’t believe privacy is worth protecting.

Every day, we make dozens of choices that we know erase our privacy in one way or another, whether we are accepting cookies, using sites that sell our information or simply choosing to remain online. 

Yet, we do them. We have been conditioned to expect that everything we do online can be watched and tracked. Privacy is no longer something we consider within our control. And this is something that has real consequences.

While we may not prioritize privacy, we still claim to be concerned.  Nearly three-quarters of Americans express concern about the government’s use of people’s data, and 77% of Americans have little to no trust in the leaders of social media companies to publicly acknowledge mistakes concerning the misuse or compromise of user data. 

Furthermore, 73% of Americans believe they have little to no control over how companies use their data, and 79% of Americans share this same sentiment toward the government. But concern without action is just resignation.

The internet was not created to protect privacy; that is no question. Yet, as it has expanded, we have not demanded that it change. But just because this is the way things have turned out does not mean it should be what we expect. We do have a say in the way the internet runs. We should have an expectation of privacy. It should be something we expect as a right on the internet.

We should not accept the internet as a fixture incompatible with privacy. At different points, groups have tried to make the internet more secure, and a lack of support for these initiatives has led them to fail. If we recognize and support the importance of privacy, we can pressure companies and lawmakers to protect individual privacy on the internet. 

And privacy is important. Even if you are not sharing war plans on your devices, you may have financial information, medical information or anything else you wouldn’t want others to have access to. While you may have nothing to hide, you deserve online privacy.

Signalgate is more than an embarrassing mistake; it is a warning. Where will our apathy take us before we change the way we view our privacy?