Stephanie Forbes is a student at the University of Maine School of Law in Portland.

Six years ago, I embarked on a journey to understand how technology affects society — for better and for worse — and what to do about it.

Today, I’m a law student searching to rediscover a sense of importance in my work in a world of growing polarization and disregard for both human rights and the rule of law.

Does privacy even matter? Upon a brief reflection, the resounding answer is louder than I previously thought.  

George Orwell’s “1984” showed that without basic freedoms, people lose the ability to become human, thereby becoming robotic arms of the Party. Telescreens controlled the stream of information that the population had access to and collected information about dissidents in the process.

Orwell drew upon parallels to totalitarian, fascist regimes to warn about technology’s ability to strip away privacy and dehumanize society. The themes of “1984” have been oft explored as such, but I find the parallels to 2026 to be a starkly uncanny reminder of the importance of privacy.     

One of the main goals in protecting the freedom of speech is the search for truth. However, as anyone who has interacted with a loved one on the other side of the political aisle recently will know, there are different realities of “truth” that exist in this country. Our voluntary engagement with online platforms creates confirmation biases by limiting exposure to different ideas and lived experiences — thus, shaping the way we think and perpetuating polarization. Instead of searching for the actual truth, we tend to seek to verify our truth.

This filtering process is data-driven. Big tech companies collect data about their users’ interactions online to guide their experiences and optimize them for future engagement — hence, why these platforms are often called “addictive.”

Apart from this, platforms like TikTok have policies that claim to also collect information indirectly disclosed through “user content” such as: racial, ethnic or national origin; religious beliefs; mental health diagnosis; sexual orientation; and citizenship or immigration status. Many companies have similar swaths of information about their users on hand, begging questions about why all this data is necessary and what’s being done with it. 

As privacy law expert Neil Richards writes, “information is power,” and without privacy, personal information can be used to manipulate people into certain beliefs, or stifle political dissent. Not unlike “1984,” the country risks sliding into a state where Americans fail to critically digest information and eventually lose the ability to freely think and discern fact from fiction. 

Regardless of your political stance, the surveillance-sharing infrastructure between private companies and government entities being used today in pursuit of a greater America creates risks for all Americans and the future of democracy. History repeats itself; while we may look back on authoritarian eras of the past with remorse, so may we too today in the future.  

For example, privacy and democracy are jeopardized when DOGE — a former non-agency entity with little transparency into its operations — obtains uncontrolled access to unprecedented amounts of data like Social Security numbers, financial records, Medicaid information, immigration status and many federal employees’ political views via their online personal data. 

Through the help of DOGE, ICE was able to obtain the personal data of over 79 million Medicaid enrollees to help track down immigrants — many of whom live in states that legally provide Medicaid coverage to non-citizens through state funding.

ICE has also partnered with several private companies like Flock to aggregate data and track individuals’ movements without a warrant to support their deportation efforts. Though Ring has denied such a partnership, it’s not impossible to imagine a Panoptic world where data and footage from users’ homes would be sought after by government entities for any number of reasons. If a private company such as TikTok, for example, felt pressure from a government entity to share vast amounts of personal user data, it could do so with the push of a button.

With even more data, the veil of privacy is torn further back in lieu of power and control. Geolocation data gathered by an app on your phone can be easily combined through data brokers like Palantir with other bits of personal information collected from any number of private companies to infer a potential target for ICE, law enforcement or any other entity willing to pay for the intel. This has put the freedom to associate in jeopardy. Immigrants and citizens alike have begun to fear the inferences that can be made about them through the people and organizations they can be linked to.

This is 2026 — not “1984.” In the past decade, new technologies have continued to collect even more data, allowing for even more surveillance. With the increased prevalence of AI at every turn, we risk edging closer and closer to a more perfect surveillance state. The risks to our freedoms and democracy are already here. Even if you don’t feel at risk today, privacy laws in the United States will not protect you from being targeted tomorrow. 

Protecting privacy is of utmost importance for technology to coexist in the free democratic society that the United States ought to be. However, we are falling far too short of that ideal.

Without stronger federal privacy protections, the burden has fallen on states to guard against exploitation. Here in Maine, state representatives have started to move in the right direction by passing LD 1822 — a comprehensive data privacy bill that would limit the collection of personal data and is comparable to some of the strongest state-level protections currently in force.

While this momentum and a recent swing in public attitudes in favor of privacy over surveillance are promising, there is much more work to be done, especially in the realm of public-private data sharing. 

Privacy matters. It should be treated as a fundamental right that right now, is critical to our freedoms, individuality, the search for truth and democracy altogether.