The Paranoia Paradox: When Privacy Meets Programming Languages
There’s something almost comically ironic about my current predicament. Here I am, a DevOps engineer who spends his days wrestling with code, infrastructure, and the endless march of technological progress, and I’ve stumbled across a question that’s been gnawing at me for weeks now.
It started with a post on Reddit that made me pause mid-scroll. Someone was asking whether the Go programming language itself could be a privacy concern, simply because Google created it. At first glance, it sounds almost absurd – worrying about the privacy implications of a programming language is like being suspicious of the pencil because you don’t trust the company that made the graphite. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised this question touches on something much deeper about our relationship with technology in 2024.
The person asking the question was clearly going through their own digital decluttering journey – moving away from Apple’s ecosystem, ditching Google services where possible, self-hosting everything they could get their hands on. It’s a path I’ve been walking myself, albeit at a more measured pace. There’s something liberating about running your own email server or hosting your own cloud storage, even if it means spending your Saturday afternoon troubleshooting why your Nextcloud instance decided to have a tantrum.
But here’s where it gets interesting. In our quest to escape the clutches of Big Tech, we often turn to open-source alternatives. And many of these alternatives – the very tools we’re using to reclaim our digital independence – are built using technologies that originated from the same companies we’re trying to avoid. Go, Swift, LLVM, React – they all have their roots in major corporations.
The responses to that Reddit post were reassuring in their technical detail. Several users pointed out that Go’s development happens in the open, with transparent code reviews and community oversight. Sure, there’s some optional telemetry (disabled by default) and the package proxy runs through Google’s servers, but these can be configured around. More importantly, if Google tried to slip something nasty into the language, the open-source community would spot it faster than you can say “pull request.”
This got me thinking about my own work here in Melbourne’s tech scene. I’ve seen firsthand how open-source projects can take on a life of their own, evolving far beyond their original creators’ intentions. The beauty of truly open-source software is that it belongs to everyone and no one simultaneously. Even if Google decided to take Go in a direction the community didn’t like, someone would fork it faster than you could grab a coffee from one of those overpriced Chapel Street cafés.
But there’s a deeper issue at play here, and it’s one that reflects our collective anxiety about living in an increasingly surveilled digital world. We’ve become so accustomed to having our data harvested, our movements tracked, and our preferences analysed that we’re starting to see potential privacy violations everywhere – even in the fundamental tools we use to build software.
This hypervigilance isn’t entirely misplaced. After all, we’ve learned the hard way that seemingly innocent features can become surveillance mechanisms. Remember when we thought cookies were just for making websites remember your login? Or when location services were simply about getting better maps? The scope creep of data collection has made us justifiably paranoid about every digital interaction.
Yet there’s a risk in taking this paranoia too far. If we start distrusting every piece of technology that has any connection to a major corporation, we might find ourselves paralysed, unable to use any modern tools effectively. It’s a bit like refusing to use roads because the government built them – technically possible, but probably not very practical.
The reality is that we need to develop a more nuanced approach to digital privacy. Instead of blanket suspicion, we should focus on understanding how different technologies actually work, what data they collect, and how that data is used. We need to distinguish between legitimate privacy concerns and unfounded anxiety.
For programming languages like Go, the key factors to consider are transparency, community oversight, and the practical separation between compile-time and runtime behaviour. A compiler can’t secretly phone home from your application unless it deliberately injects that code – and in an open-source language with thousands of eyes on the code, such malicious behaviour would be discovered quickly.
The broader lesson here is about finding balance in our digital lives. Yes, we should be cautious about privacy. Yes, we should question the motivations of large corporations. But we also need to be pragmatic about the tools we use and the trade-offs we make. Sometimes the best privacy-focused solution is built on infrastructure that originated from the very companies we’re wary of – and that’s okay, as long as we understand the implications and maintain our ability to choose alternatives.
The beauty of the open-source ecosystem is that it gives us options. We can use Go to build privacy-respecting applications, we can configure our environments to avoid unnecessary data collection, and we can contribute to projects that align with our values. Most importantly, we can remain vigilant without becoming paralysed by our own paranoia.
Privacy is important, but so is progress. Sometimes the path to digital freedom involves walking through territories mapped by those we’re trying to escape from. The key is knowing when we’re doing it and why.