Scopophobia
In 2018, an Indian psychology journal put out a case study describing how one woman’s digital privacy obsession was sending her life into a spiral. The 54-year-old patient showed up at the doctor’s doorstep showing “significant distress and fear about her safety,” after reading report after report after report detailing hackers pawning off people’s personal data.
It’s a pretty rational (and common!) fear, but it’s also one that led to this woman’s life falling apart. She started missing important emails because she was too scared to check her inbox, and she stopped paying any of her bills online because she was too scared to use the bank’s online payment processor.
“Although computed security needs to be taken seriously, it might become excessive for some people leading to avoidance of [their] computer,” the doctor wrote, dubbing her diagnosis as “internet phobia.” That name didn’t catch on, but some researchers in the digital privacy space have started using another term instead: “scopophobia,” which just translates to an excessive fear of being stared at by anyone else. Thanks to the global pandemic forcing all of us to live most of our lives on the digital plane, that means—as one privacy analyst put it—we’re all being digitally stared at on a near-constant basis. Who wouldn’t be paranoid about that?
