A conversation about privacy, really?

Brad recently posted a view of contemporary privacy on fidlr.tv:

Privacy is often mistaken for secrecy, which it is not. Secrecy is the impossible task to totally conceal sets of information; it can work for awhile, but ultimately, the data gets out. Organizations like governments, corporations, and peer groups continue to utilize secrecy because it sometimes serves short-term goals. I don't think anyone expects it to be perfect, or even remotely near perfect, or last forever.

Privacy, on the other hand, is the ability to control the use of your information. It isn't about keeping it from everyone -- and here's where we get obvious -- for that would make communication impossible. 'Perfect privacy' isn't just impossible; it isn't even a coherent concept to argue against. Like every single other social institution or practice, neither will ever be perfect or complete. Yet we practice privacy anyways, with its limits and flaws, much like we practice friendship, politics, and, well, every single other social institution and practice.

Instead, privacy is a matter of access to your information. It has endless everyday examples that furnish us with baselines. Talking politics with your father at home, for example. You don't take actions to automatically allow access to this information by your friends, boss, local police, or state officials. It would take some work, and the outcome might not be desirable.

And of course, this is an immensely crafted situation, a construct; 'unnatural', if you're into defining the 'natural'. As hunter-gatherers, and in most of history's civilizations, our superiors had access to our politics -- and to our social relations in general, our fears and wants, our sexualities, our private lives that didn't even really exist, then, as a distinct sphere. But as governing structures became stronger, centralizing toward the modern states that we know today, the balance of power switched so enormously that a new consensus emerged. In the new and (if you like) artificial world of borders and census-takers, the power and benefits bestowed on individuals simply from being a member of that community -- they no longer sufficed to protect them against the new and (if you like) artificialsurveillanceapparatus of the state, and of the workplace, and of digitized gossip. Laws and regulations were won through struggle so successfully that now we would have to choose to make our private political discussions a matter of the public record. It was part of a broad process we've since named the Enlightenment.

The new arrangement: it isn't much fun. There's passwords and conspiracy theories and a lot of paperwork. We all want out of it, and with each technological shift or revolution, we eagerly await our deliverance. Radio was supposed to free us from the shackles of state-institutionalized education; it did not. The same was expected of television, which was also to democratize our societies and make communication 'free' -- TV didn't do it for us, either. The internet is the latest 'frontier', approached with all the optimism of the frontiers in now-named America, and during the last century, space. We deserve a world without discrimination and power games based on class, gender, ethnic, age, sexuality, and disability, so we keep on demanding it from our technology. But our technology is just tools put to work at our old social practices, and there, we're stuck back at that depressing tradeoff we established with theEnlightenment.

Online privacy is the attempt to ensure the internet does notreduceour freedoms below those compromises we've already taken. It is an expression of our hopes for these new techniques to further self-expression, education, democracy, all those Enlightenment ideals -- but not expose us in ways we've grudgingly accepted to be harmful. I'm willing to bet that everyone would rather be in a world where they could tell anyone anything and not face recrimination. But we aren't all comfortable office'd system administrators that, on average, don't harbor any class, gender, ethnic, etc. views that will get them burned, or identities that will encourage others to monitor or outright spy on them. My office is cleaned by hispanic women who make 30% less than the market average, and my university is doing everything in its power to break their union's effort to get them a better life. I'm a white male doing a history degree. Sorry for being obvious again, but those Enlightenment privacy values -- even though they were born in moments of racism and oppression -- when applied universally, they're the only reason that union can even function.

I don't know what percentage of my digitized information is private. There's credit cards, my Canadian SIN and American SSN, intimate telephone conversations from past relationships, the above-mentioned conversations with my father, and, now, a particular and oft-public corner of the internet called the 'social web' or 'web2'. Of the latter category, most is public, but I demand the right to have some of it private. The reason lies with content from the offline world, and the already-digitized world that is usually (and wrongly) excluded from our 'online' category (i.e. telephone conversations). The same practices are either moving online, or moving to a different part of online -- and, for the same reasons, I still want the right to regulate some of it, and I want that right for others. Expectations otherwise are really just attacks against the Enlightenment, and have a heavy burden of argument to bear.

An interesting experiment: read the entire post above without clicking through any links or viewing their hyperlink destinations. Then, read the entire post again, and click through the links. What did you notice? On the first read, it looks like something of a reasonably articulated discussion of a particular view of privacy in a particular historical context. Specifically, what is know as (roughly) the "control theory" of privacy. This isn't exactly a new theory of privacy (arising in the mid-1800s at the latest), but rather one that has gotten a lot of traction as of late, due to the instant electronic mediation of life/identity. Brad associates the control of privacy with historical moves in the Enlightenment period (my guess is that he would start this period roughly with Kant and his formulation of the grounds of knowledge, as the most obvious move to theorize salient points about personhood).1 Others have made this point with regard to the market economy (e.g., Sun Microsystem's Simon Philips), survelience (e.g. Cory Doctorow and many others), etc.

Okay, on the second read you probably noticed that this post serves as a parry and riposte to some odd Twitter conversation about online videos and other narcissismisms. What is equally interesting is the "privacy creep" evident in online presence; what used to be taken as buffoonery and ostentatiousness is now ribbed as being virtually frigid, tantamount to the "pussy" actions of a consuming online producer who "dosnt like 2 b n them [online activities]". Control of privacy often has little to do with technologies, although they can impact it, such as what the courts have articulated as a distinction between a police officer looking through a window and bouncing a laser microphone off the glass to pick up sounds within (one is privacy impacting, the other is not). Some technology can enable greater privacy (again, PGP and SSL/TLS), but the way these get adopted tends to account for the real impact. For example, even though the first high-speed in-vehicle remote toll pass was developed to anonymize payment on highway tolls, the system that got adopted can (and does) track these movements. What is striking about Brad's online transparency (and it really is "transparent", not "private") is that he frequently posts ideological views, calendars, personal photos, personal videos, GPS location, contact information and whatever the flavour of the month "life stream" technology demands of him. Strangely, he acquiesces to everything just short of being economically detrimental (at least I am yet to see him post his credit card information). "Expectations otherwise" aren't about "rights" or legal and regulatory developments, they are about identity. Online isn't just "online", it's the virtualization of personhood.

1) As a sidebar, "perfect privacy", or "secrecy" is attainable, I think, using Privacy Enhancement Technologies (PETs), which can be used to control "regular" privacy as well. PGP did this for email (although no one uses it), and SSL/TLS did this with online banking.

Comments

[Tom Sparks]

Quinn, thanks for your commentary on and capture of Fidlr's privacy post.. I keep an eye open for new nuggets from Brad I guess you do to. Now I will keeping an eye on your blog too. Ironic? No I am not a big brother.

New internet technologies have implications that we can't see or choose to ignore with out think about it . One day we will wake up and think how did this happen. So I must disagree with you when you say privacy has little to do with technology; but maybe I miss read that in your post.

Thanks , I look forward to reading more of your thoughts.