From 9/11 to TikTok: How our sense of privacy changed
The past two decades have completely reshaped the way people think about privacy.
The post-9/11 surveillance boom
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, governments worldwide expanded mass surveillance in the name of national security. In the U.S., the Patriot Act enabled unprecedented data collection on citizens. In Europe, new counterterrorism laws made surveillance routine.
By the late 2000s, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn became part of everyday life. People volunteered their personal information — birthdays, travel photos, job histories, even real-time location — often without realizing these platforms were building one of the most powerful marketing and surveillance databases in history.
The trade-off illusion
Convenience replaced caution. Free apps and services came at the cost of personal data. Companies monetized it, governments tapped into it, and most users ignored it. Privacy shifted from a right to something you had to actively fight for.
Today, with the rise of Clearview AI and Palantir, this trade-off feels less like a choice and more like an inevitable condition of modern life.
The face in the crowd: Clearview AI
Imagine walking into a café. Someone takes a blurry picture of you. With Clearview AI, that’s enough to find your old Facebook profile, your LinkedIn résumé, your family photos — even your home address.
Clearview AI is a U.S.-based company that has built one of the world’s largest facial recognition databases. It claims to hold over 30 billion images, scraped from publicly accessible sources: social media, websites, even news articles.
How it works
Clearview’s system takes a photo, compares it against billions of images in its database, and returns potential matches. According to Clearview, its algorithm achieves over 98% accuracy in some NIST tests.
Real-world use
- Law enforcement: Police in the U.S. have used Clearview to identify suspects in theft, assault, and child exploitation cases. In Ukraine, the Ministry of Defense reportedly used Clearview during the 2022 Russian invasion to help identify dead soldiers and alleged war criminals.
- Private use: Clearview has pitched its service to private companies, from banks to retailers — raising fears of mass profiling and stalking.
Global backlash
Clearview’s approach has triggered massive legal challenges:
- Italy fined the company €20 million and ordered deletion of Italians’ data [1].
- The Netherlands imposed a €30.5 million fine in 2024 [3].
- Australia declared its practices unlawful in 2021, citing lack of consent.
- Canada banned Clearview from operating, calling its practices “illegal mass surveillance.”
Civil rights organizations like the ACLU argue that Clearview turns every person into a potential suspect, regardless of whether they’ve committed a crime.
The algorithm that decides: Palantir
If Clearview is about identifying faces, Palantir is about connecting dots.
Founded in 2003 with early funding from the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel, Palantir Technologies builds software to integrate and analyze massive datasets. Its platforms — Gotham and Foundry — are used by governments and corporations in over 150 countries.
What Palantir analyzes
Palantir ingests:
- Financial transactions
- Phone and internet metadata
- Medical and health records
- Social media activity
- Government and corporate databases
The result: powerful models that reveal hidden links, predict threats, and guide real-world decisions.
NymVPN: A cloak in the glass city
Against this backdrop, NymVPN offers a radically different vision.
Most VPNs function like tinted windows: they hide your IP address but leave metadata exposed. Anyone monitoring traffic can still see when you connect, how often, and to whom.
NymVPN is different. It uses a Noise Generating Mixnet — a decentralized network that shuffles and delays data packets before delivery.
Why a mixnet matters
- Metadata protection: Even if your traffic is encrypted, metadata (like time and frequency) can expose your habits. Mixnets conceal both content and patterns.
- Decentralization: Unlike traditional VPNs with centralized servers, NymVPN distributes traffic across independent nodes. There is no single point of attack or failure.
- Resilience against surveillance: By mixing and delaying traffic, mixnets make it nearly impossible for adversaries to trace who is communicating with whom.
A simple analogy
If a VPN is like darkening the windows of your car, a mixnet is like driving through a maze of mirrors: your path is scrambled, and no one can tell where you started or where you’re headed.
Who benefits
- Journalists and activists: Protecting sources and bypassing censorship
- Everyday users: Preventing advertisers, ISPs, or governments from building behavioral profiles
- Businesses: Ensuring sensitive communications and transactions remain confidential.
NymVPN transforms privacy from a technical feature into a daily act of empowerment.
The crossroads: Security vs. freedom
Clearview AI and Palantir highlight a profound dilemma: the same technologies that protect society can also undermine democracy.
- Clearview’s facial recognition helps catch criminals, but also risks turning every person into a suspect.
- Palantir’s data analytics helps prevent attacks, but also enables digital authoritarianism through opaque algorithms.
In contrast, NymVPN represents the possibility of a future where privacy is not surrendered for security. Instead, it demonstrates that technology can protect both.
Freedom in the digital era is fragile. Every time we choose how to protect our data, we decide whether that freedom survives.
