Afraid of What?

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Yesterday I started using Claude. For years, ChatGPT had been my editor, my translator, and my proofreader, but a book changed that: Co-Existence, Ethan Mollick’s latest.¹ In it, Mollick mentions that he writes with Claude. If someone who has devoted his career to studying artificial intelligence finds it useful, I figured, it was worth a try. I tried it, and for now at least, as an editor for my writing, I think it’s better.

As usually happens, curiosity pulled me further. I started reading everything people say about Claude and about Anthropic, the company behind it. The refrain is always the same: they have access to our information, that’s dangerous, our data could be exposed.

Fine. Let’s grant all of it: they have our information, and someday it could leak.

Now let’s ask an uncomfortable question. What if the way you live your life is perfectly ordinary? Better yet: is it? Because if it is, would you really be afraid of your data getting out?

I suspect not. I suspect the fear comes from somewhere else. It comes from the shady things you search for online when no one’s watching. From the way you scroll through your neighbor’s daughter’s Instagram, a girl who’s barely sixteen. From the kind of porn you watch, the explicit photos you keep.

The numbers back this up. Economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former Google data scientist, spent years studying what we search for when we think no one can see us. In Everybody Lies, he explains that before the internet, we hid our shameful thoughts from other people, and that we still do, except on the sites that promise us anonymity. We don’t just ask Google for information; we confess to it, typing things like “I hate my boss” or “I am drunk.”² That’s why he calls Google and Pornhub “a sort of digital truth serum.”³ What that serum reveals isn’t pretty. When people type “I want to have sex with my…” into Google, the most common word to finish the sentence is “mom,” roughly 720 searches a month, and more than three-quarters of those searches are incestuous.⁴ And here’s the most telling finding of all, from a separate study: economists Alex Marthews and Catherine Tucker found that after Edward Snowden exposed U.S. government surveillance in 2013, people became less likely to search for terms they considered sensitive or risky.⁵ We didn’t stop wanting those things. We stopped searching for them because someone might be watching.

One distinction matters here. Having a fantasy isn’t the same as doing harm, and Stephens-Davidowitz himself cautions that what someone searches for alone isn’t necessarily what they do.⁶ But not everything is fantasy. Lingering over photos of a minor isn’t a private quirk; it’s the first step toward real harm. The problem isn’t that our minds are strange. It’s what we choose to do with them.

That’s the real fear. You’re not afraid of your data being exposed. You’re afraid of you being exposed. Of someone opening the door and seeing who you are when no one’s looking: a creep, a freak, a weirdo.

Orwell imagined a world in 1984 where Big Brother sees everything,⁷ and ever since, his novel has been the go-to argument for privacy advocates. I know what you’ll say. Privacy doesn’t exist just to protect the weirdos. It also protects ordinary people from identity theft, from an insurer who raises your premium over something you googled, from a government that decides tomorrow that what you believe today is a crime. That’s true, and I won’t deny it. It’s also true that being watched changes anyone: after Snowden, even decent people grew more careful about what they searched. But there’s something those risks can’t touch: the peace of mind of someone who lives decently. An honest person can lose a password, money, or anonymity, but they don’t have to spend their life hiding how they act. That’s their deepest protection, the one no data breach can take away. Maybe that’s where what we call a transparent life comes from: not from no one seeing you, but from not caring if they do. The Gospel of John said it two thousand years ago: whoever does evil hates the light and keeps away from it so their deeds won’t be exposed, but whoever lives by the truth comes into the light.⁸

Maybe the question was never what companies know about us, but what we’d think of ourselves if everyone knew.

I’m not writing this from a safe distance. The person behind these words doesn’t speak from purity: I was a creep, a weirdo, and I did contemptible things in my past. I don’t hide them, because hiding them would prove everything I’ve just said. But today I’ve started choosing the light, letting it shine on what I do, because every day I’m more convinced that good is always the better choice.

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Notes

1. Ethan Mollick, Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI (Portfolio, 2026).
2. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are (Dey Street Books, 2017), Introduction.
3. Ibid., ch. 2, “Was Freud Right?”
4. Ibid.
5. Alex Marthews and Catherine Tucker, “Government Surveillance and Internet Search Behavior,” SSRN working paper, 2014.
6. Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies, ch. 4, “Digital Truth Serum.”
7. George Orwell, 1984.
8. John 3:20–21.