Many people today seem to be at least somewhat concerned about their privacy online. They are more or less aware of the tracking powers of “Big Tech” (e.g. Google, Facebook), and are considering moving to the less privacy-invasive alternatives. But often I’d hear people describe their experience along the lines of “I tried to use DuckDuckGo, but the search results are so much worse than Google that I switched back after a bit.” Although accurate, this style of thinking misses a key point about privacy: it cannot come free. To gain more of it, we must pay a price, in the form of convenience.

Part of that price comes from the difference in technological advancements between the much larger incumbents and the smaller, privacy-respecting competition. Google, with its effectively limitless resources, has invested orders of magnitude more into their search algorithm than someone like DuckDuckGo (DDG), and naturally will have better results. But there is another significant cause for the difference in quality between these services, one that is intrinsic and will never go away: a service provided by someone who knows less about you will always be worse than that which is provided by someone who knows more about you.

This point is easy to understand and demonstrate. You can test it simply by searching for something on Google while logged in, and again when logged out. The logged in search results will almost always be more relevant, sometimes by a scarily large degree. Another example can be seen in the comparison between Apple Maps and Google Maps. In the digitization efforts of map data, Apple seems to have chosen the privacy-respecting route of deliberately reducing the geographical details of private properties (i.e. people’s homes). Public parks and pools are digitized (as green and blue colored shapes respectively), while private lawns and pools in people’s yards are notably missing¹. Google on the other hand, digitizes much more indiscriminately, and as a result offers are higher quality map experience.

However, despite it being a fairly obvious fact, many privacy-conscious people surprisingly miss or ignore it. These different types of services are often judged on equal grounds, even in contexts around concerns for privacy. If we were to take this point seriously, then we should never hold privacy-friendly products up to the same standard of convenience or quality as products that utilize more tracking data². This is not to make excuses for the current shortcomings of privacy-friendly products, they definitely all have plenty of room for improvements without compromising their stance around privacy. Rather, this is more of an acknowledgement that the gap in convenience between these types of products can only be reduced, but never fully closed. The intrinsic cost of privacy will always need to be paid by the end user.

This inherent tradeoff between privacy and convenience is very similar to the one between privacy and security. In a world of total surveillance (i.e. zero privacy), just as how crime can be reduced to zero, inconvenience can also be eliminated. Why even search for something, when the store can instantly know what you want, the moment you want it (or even before, with advanced predictive technologies), and can automatically have it delivered?

The realization of this unavoidable cost of privacy is also why I’m not very optimistic about the fight for our privacy online. As long as people value convenience over everything else, the Googles and Facebooks of the world will continue to prevail. To gain the upper hand, we must learn to embrace the inconvenience that inevitably arises when we choose to hide parts of ourselves online.