So what is the deal with privacy and our lives online? Do we electronically reveal all, glance coyly above our delicate fans or don the modesty jacket over that strappy sundress, otherwise Great Aunt Harriett will never let up throughout Sunday lunch on Standards Today.
Here's a couple of quotes to ponder.
'Individuals contribute throughout their life, leaving a lifelong trail of personal data', Dieter Sommer, Co-ordinator of the EU's Primelife project on private data and identity theft.
'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place', Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, December 2009 CNBC interview.
Some contrasting points then. A part of me feels like saying, if I've got nothing to hide, why should I have to prove it? And perhaps that the crux of online privacy. With these remarkable new toys we have, seems that human behaviour is playing catch-up on defining some boundaries. What's more, figuring all this out sits at the intersections of commerce, human communication and the sheer niftiness and convenience of the rapidly-changing web. So that's what I want to look at in the next couple of posts.
Researching this, I've found that social media offers a very (and by that I could mean spookily) wide range of profiling, data mining and usage behaviour analysis of what we do online. I've also found there's a continuum of reasons for why we want privacy online and the level of privacy that we seek. Some of its just plain old fashioned wanting to be private and we all have our own tolerances for defining that. Other reasons can be to avoid inappropriate disclosure, whether that be the (later regretted) status update complaining about the potato salad at the annual family picnic or of course, the now oldie but a goodie of those particularly unflattering party snaps. Shoemaker (in Hugl 2011, p. 386) suggests that although some people might claim not to care about the management of their identities, we all have flaws and do care about how others see us - self-identity as he terms it. He argues then that for us, the thought is 'mortifying' that through data mining and profiling, a stranger may come to know our flaws. And hence my getting the heebie-jeebies researching this article....
Another issue of course (and one I'm reflecting on personally) is the blurring of the lines between one's private, public and professional life. According to Brandtzaeg, Luders and Skjetne in the Journal of Human Computer Interaction, the more recent trend that Facebook is seeing, is the rise of users over 40 (2010, p. 1018). Users who, unlike what younger counterparts may face, have to deal with the tricky possibility of blending family, co-workers and business contacts all on the one site. I mean you might be a hotshot in the boardroom, but do you really want your fellow business execs knowing about your weekend passion for linedancing with your dog? (not that there's anything wrong with that I might add!).On a more serious level, there's a flurry of reports at present about how employers are requiring job applicants to provide access to their Facebook accounts. So much so that according to The Washington Post, Democrat US Senator Richard Blumenthal is writing a law stopping employers from asking job applicants for access to their Facebook accounts. This is on the not unreasonable grounds that it's an invasion of privacy (again, those pictures of winning the local linedancing with your dog contest....). Facebook have responded in a post basically saying to employers, don't do it unless you want to get sued.
A variation on that too, is the still unclear territory of use of social media in the workplace. Some employers won't allow it outright as they feel staff will just waste time and take advantage of workplace access, but increasingly social media is becoming an important business tool. As an aside, I'm old and grumpy enough to remember when the interweb machine was first introduced into offices and access was given out with an eye-dropper for much the same reasons. I'm not so ancient that I have first-hand experience of when 'the telephone' was first installed, but I imagine much the same angst was expressed about staff and personal calls. Seems though that people somehow figured out how to behave like adults. Alternatively, HR departments, unions and tribunals are grappling with employer surveillance of their staff's use of social media. A good guide is from the UK employment tribunal service ACAS on Workplaces and social networking: implications for employment law.
Another consideration is quite simply your personal information being used in ways you just don't want. Flicking through the privacy policies of various social media, they make it pretty clear that personal information is aggregated for selling to third parties to offer us 'better services' i.e. advertising. It's been widely reported that a former Google executive recently blasted Google for turning from in his view, an innovative tech company into an 'ad company', obsessed with harvesting people's private information. Fuch calls this 'economic surveillance' (in Hugl 2011, p. 392) and he backs up this characterisation by pointing out that it's no accident you have to opt out of many features on social networking sites. Opting-out I might add, that can be quite fiddly trying to track down and/or keep track of. Mmmmhh.
Finally on a very serious note, there can be legitimate concerns over ID fraud, stalking or a related insidious behaviour of trolling. For example, there was last year's raising of the alarm when Sony Playstation was successfully hacked and people's passwords and personal details were uncovered. And a flowering of frantically monitoring bank accounts unfolded....
On this point, we may find Foucault peeking in and giving us a knowing look, as there is something he could contribute here (he would, wouldn't he). Brandtzaeg et al in their research found that social network sites are seeking to increase the social utility and diversity of the user population - ostensibly the 'all friends in one-place solution' (2010, p. 1007). But there's that blurring of lines again and it can lead to a type of social surveillance and social control. They suggest that one response people are adopting to ensure some privacy, is a social conformity in what they share. And in some ways this responds to Eric Schmidt's sentiments. However, this also signals a certain discipline and exercising of self-control over behaviour, at least in what we put online due to this constant pervasive surveillance. What people post online is a continuing work in progress. There's still folk who'll put up the most ill-judged content such as the aforementioned unflattering party snaps and there still seems to be a naivety - people, think about whether you want your complete birthdate available for all to see on Facebook! Bank accounts I ask you! But at the same time, there appears to be an emerging 'blandness' as well of more anodyne comments about sunny weekends, missed buses and wedding announcements.
I promised you Foucault. In this case, he drew on Bentham's theory of the panopticon. This was Bentham's cleverly designed prison which meant prisoners could be seen at any angle by prison guards, even though the prisoners couldn't see the guards themselves. The expectation would be that prisoners would therefore self-monitor and control their behaviour accordingly. Foucault extrapolated this theory to modern society and the way certain (more or less) collective social norms and attitudes become the intangible and ongoing means of surveillance, by requiring that we conform to them (Lilley et al 2009, p. 334-335). Hence that modesty jacket.
So the big question beckons. With the extraordinary amount of information available online about us, in a mashed up social context and with changing levels of visibility.....is online media the electronic panopticon? What irks you about life online? Or are you reasonably sanguine about it all?
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.
Lilley, S., Wray-Bliss, E. and Linstead, S. (2009) ‘Organisational Control’ in Management and Organisation: a critical text, 2nd edn, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
And thanks to the Huff Post Tech page, specifically, Screenshots of Despair for some of the images in this (very long, I know) post!
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