If one day my cat could understand human language, talk and freely wander the neighborhood chatting with other cats about their respective owners, I would feel extremely uneasy. She literally knows all my secrets: when I watch TV, she lies on my lap, watching me pick my nose and drool. When I’m taking a shower, she would brazenly walk into the bathroom and confidently stare at my naked body.

Unfortunately, in modern society, all of this is real. The rise of social media makes people’s lives increasingly transparent, and some even crave this kind of transparency. Thousands of people live in front of cameras and social media everyday, passionately sharing what they ate for breakfast and why they broke up with their exes. People expose themselves through text, images, and videos, forming a massive network of images and information of billions of people.

Moreover, people are constantly forced to expose themselves to the surveillance of digital “monitors”: shopping websites such as Amazon and Ali record our shopping habits; Google monitors our search history; Facebook, Weibo and other social media eavesdrop on our social networks. Often at times, we can not use an app unless we click the box in front of “I agree to the private policy”.

While cats can only peek at our privacy unilaterally without speech, the increasingly transparent society often puts our privacy at risk of exposure. In 2015, 78.2% of Chinese online users’ personal identity information was leaked. This is not a rare event. In recent years, numerous privacy leaks of over a billion users/persons have occurred globally. For instance, Yahoo leaked 3 billion account information in 2019, while the Indian government website leaked 1 billion citizen information.

Frequent personal privacy breaches have become a major factor affecting social security. In 2021, 32% of the telecom fraud cases reported in China were related to personal data leakage. The travel information of many infected people was exposed in digital communities, leading to several intense netizen events. Social transparency brings people closer in space, but more distant mentally.

If people have no privacy, where is their safety and dignity? Will there still be trust and virtue between individuals?

Rousseau’s call for distance is still applicable today: “Never do or say anything that you don’t want the whole world to see or hear.” Confidentiality, as a concept that opposes transparency, promotes a reshaping of the corroded distance in a transparent society, giving uncertain and unknown things space and shelter. This way, invisible control will gradually decline, and autonomy will quietly return.

If my cat could speak, but I didn’t want my secrets exposed, the only solution would be to use a cat cage.