Privacy: Why the iPhone battery spying trick shows that everyone needs to care about being snooped on

Almost everything is spying on you – all the way from your TV to, it emerged this week, the battery in your phone. And most people don’t care one bit.

Arguments about privacy have been raging for as long as we’ve had private and public lives. But they have picked up in recent years: as horrific acts of terror gave people a reason to try and find out more about private citizens, and as the Snowden revelations showed just how dangerous that had been.

And they tend to be reduced down to philosophical arguments: should we be happy giving up some part of our private life to keep ourselves safe? Or are the principles of privacy more important than that?

But increasing numbers of cyber attacks and other hacks are making privacy no longer a philosophical question. Security and privacy are becoming one and the same thing - and people aren’t ready to get worked up about them.

That was shown this week when security researchers showed that websites were able to use apparently innocent information about people’s phone’s battery to track them around the internet. Phones send out information about how much charge they have left to make sure that websites go easy on them if they’re running low – but that same information can be used to get around even the most privacy-conscious users’ ways of hiding themselves.

It shows just how small some important ways of intruding on your privacy might be. And it can also show how high the stakes are.

That same battery problem, for instance, might seem innocuous for people who aren’t worried about telling people about how often they charge their phone.

But it means, for example, that even if someone was trying to hide the fact that they were looking at opposition sites in a repressive country, they would be exposed. They might visit an official page and then head off to one critical of the government, for instance – and they would be able to be watched as they went from one to the other, even if they took precautions like using a virtual private network, which hides browsing.

Once that information is found, the ways that malicious people could use it are huge – it can be used for attacks like ransomware, which locks down your entire computer and then forces you to pay to get it back. As well as shutting down dissent, information about browsing habits could be used for everything from blackmail to attacks in the real world.

And it also allows companies to rip people off. Uber has already revealed that it knows exactly how much battery a person has – and that when they’re running low, they’re far more likely to take up a taxi, even if the charge is higher.

The company says it hasn’t yet used that information. But the very fact that it gets it – and that it has explored how it matters – shows how some of the most boring looking data can actually be used to exploit people in really minor but important ways.

All of those ways show that most people do actually have something to hide. And once you have information to hide, the very fact that it’s being spied on makes it dangerous.

Much of people’s being relaxed about privacy comes from a trust in the way that government and other bodies hold onto the information they collect through snooping on people. But those intelligence agencies haven’t traditionally been especially careful with their information.

Last year it was revealed that spies have been dismissed for looking up information in their private lives, for instance. Papers also showed how spies have been using information for things including finding out what their address is to send them birthday cards – a relatively harmless reason to access data, but something that campaign groups said shows just how personal and how easily any information about your private life can be accessed.

And it isn’t just governments using that data. In many settings, privacy can be the wrong word – it implies that breaches of privacy make something public, whereas it can often mean giving it into the hands of some other private body.

Facebook, for instance, knows almost everything about everyone who uses it. And that is usually fine – except when it exposes people’s most personal information.

Earlier this year, one Facebook user described how he had gone to a meeting for parents of suicidal young people, at which the families were meant to stay anonymous. But Facebook’s location tracking pinpointed where he had been, and matched him with other people who had been at that same sensitive meeting.

Most people always have something to hide – they might just not know it. It’s becoming harder and harder to actually keep it hidden.