The electronic panopticon....privacy and our lives online, part two

In my last post, I started sounding forth on the messy, complicated, work in progress issue of privacy and our lives online.  I found that there's a whole lotta, quite valid, reasons as to why we want privacy online and that it seems, we're still figuring out what are the boundaries.  For a big finish, I drew on the work of Foucault and the 'panopticon' effect of the constant surveillance that social media suggests and how that can affect us.  In this final post on privacy, I want to look at our right to privacy, how might we begin to define privacy for social media and what the implications can be for PR and public communications practice.


Interestingly, a couple of things have happened on privacy issues since I last posted (but not I might hasten to add, BECAUSE I posted!).  In the US, Senator Al Franken has argued that companies like Facebook and Google are gaining such dominance, there's a possibility of them becoming as the HuffPost Tech reports, 'immune to market pressure and more likely to violate users' privacy in the quest for profits'.  On the employers-asking-job-applicants-for-Facebook-access issue, this has attracted the interest of the UK's Information Commissioner who's asserting important considerations such as Data Protection Act.  And then with possibly unfortunate timing, on the 1st April 2012 the UK Government announced that it's planning new legislation that will enable the Government to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK.  In our User-Generated-Content world, it's a story that attracted nearly 1800 comments....

But when all's said and done, should we be concerned about our online privacy? Daniel Solove of George Washington University Law School declares in his book, Understanding Privacy that privacy is a matter of 'profound importance around the world', (2008, p. 2) and cites a range of statutes, constitutional rights and judicial decisions from across the globe recognising this concern.  In addition, online privacy is attracting increasing levels of world-wide attention.  Europe sees the regular 'Summit on Privacy and Identity Management for Life' and the European Union funds the PrimeLife research project into online privacy. So yes Virginia, privacy matters and we have a right to it.

So yay, we have a right to privacy, but how do you actually define privacy as it relates to social media?   The literature indicates this is something of a work in progress. Firstly, Brandtzaeg et al identify two types of privacy. Social privacy referring to how people protect themselves from other users - greetings Ms/Mr Job Interviewer.  And institutional privacy involving how companies that run social media use people's data - why hello there Senator Franken (2010, p. 1007).

Pretty quickly though, it becomes clearly apparent that defining and for that matter valuing privacy, is heavily contextual.   Hugl rounds up many of these contexts such as the problem of mixing different social groups on Facebook, Westin's description of 'individual privacy balances' based on constantly changing 'situational events and life-cycle progress', (in Hugl 2011, p. 396) and Rachels' identifying that privacy amounts to us having control over our ability 'create and maintain different sorts of relationships' (in Hugl 2011, p. 396).  So closely following-up behind context, is being able to control our online information.  In other words, as time goes by, it may or may not be so much of an issue including family members in your Facebook friends or, being really open on Twitter about who you support on 'Britain's Got Talent' (no matter what everyone else says).

But wait there's more. At any one time there's a range of factors at play in any online privacy question.  Therefore ladies and gentlemen we have multidimensional theories for defining privacy and life online (Hugl 2011, p. 396), as privacy also involves being able to exercise freedom of choice in relation to the type, duration and frequency of contact with others online.  In this explanation DeCew talks about informational privacy, accessibility privacy and expressive privacy (in Hugl 2011, p. 397) which takes in things like the privacy of medical and financial data and takes us into the realm of institutional privacy.

Danel Solove suggests that also involved in online privacy is the 'dimension of particular practices' (in Hugl 2011, p. 397).  These are the 'activities, customs, norms and traditions' (in Hugl 2011, p. 397) of a person's behaviour and protecting privacy then is about protecting against 'disruptions to certain practices' (in Hugl 2011, p. 397).  So for example, you might be an ardent peace activist, but you don't want people at work to know because it's a particularly conservative workplace.  Disclosure could be a disruption to your employment, or at least a measure of how uncomfortable it might get in the tearoom.

Privacy then is highly complex, contextual and multi-layered.  So again, what on Earth is it??  Solove is helpful in that he recommends policy-makers use as a starting point, the place at which privacy becomes a problem. That is, when a privacy intrusion 'interferes with the integrity of certain activities and even destroys or inhibits some activities', (2008, p. 9).  With that wider view, instead of trying to pin down a common denominator, we can 'conceptualise privacy by focusing on the specific types of disruption', (2008, p. 9), which therefore considers the aforementioned, complex, contextual and multi-layered nature of privacy.  And maybe this is a way of getting a few curtains and blinds around that electronic panopticon??

For PR practitioners this type of understanding can pave the way for thinking about ethical practice when using social media.  It does this by allowing for thinking about the impact of our social media choices, according to the circumstance and context - a PR plan drawing on people's personal information in a very conservative culture would look rather different to a plan developed for elsewhere.  The principles of the Data Protection Act in the UK (but reflected in other countries) offers guidance by highlighting the importance of people having control over their online information - so basically don't collect more information than you have to and be very transparent in how people can find out how you're planning to use and store that aggregated information for a strategic communications plan. 

As good PR students, many of us have been trained in the fundamentals of social research and there's a very important principle in social research that can be applied to upholding privacy - consent and in particular informed consent.  For example, many a time there's grumbling whenever Facebook suddenly changes any of its settings and it can be a devil of a job trying to get your privacy settings back to what you feel comfortable with.  Is this really informed consent?  Maybe even the bigger guiding questions would be:  how do you like your personal online information to be handled?

On a final point and without wanting to depress or scare the daylights out of anyone.  Thought I'd share this short video from the US organisation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center about how you can look after your privacy online.  Enjoy! (or worthily learn, or something).

The academic bits - the referencing:

Brandtzaeg, P. B., Luders, M. and Skjetne, J. H. (2010) 'Too many Facebook 'friends'? Content sharing and sociability versus the need for privacy in social network sites' in Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 26(11-12), pp. 1006-1030.

Hugl, U. (2011) 'Reviewing person's value of privacy of online social networking', in Internet Research, 21(4), pp. 384-407.