What is Privacy?













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3 thoughts on “What is Privacy?

  1. Leo

    Excellent post. The way I like to frame it is just because someone’s standing in the middle of the sidewalk handing out free donuts doesn’t give them the right to randomly beat you up, even if you quite like their crullers.

  2. PAPPP

    I generally agree, especially in the point that this is fundamentally all about power dynamics, but I feel like there is something important missing from the argument: we live in a highly technologically mediated society where average individuals don’t even have nominal understanding, much less control, over the medium. It’s very hard to work social conventions when people are, analogously, unable to modulate their voice or dip their heads. Worse, we haven’t even defined signs analogous to voice modulation; just as Poe’s Law warns it’s impossible to reliably detect unlabeled sarcasm on the ‘net, we have no signifiers to delineate, for example, kvetching to your friends (relatively private) from attempting activism (relatively public). The tools we are provided are little more than holding up a sign with “Private” (or the names of your intended audience) printed on it while continuing to yell in public, and that is awkward, out of band, and just as likely to attract voyeuristic interest than accomplish privacy.

    This isn’t victim blaming, or even learned helplessness, it’s conditioned helplessness. We’re more than 30 years out from making (or having made for us) the decision that we will interact with technology through a thin veneer over a system someone else dictates and controls. That “someone else” is, unfortunately, the mixture of governmental and commercial interests who have been merrily exploiting that delegated power since. Alan Kay has been warning us about it and working on alternatives for decades, but there has never been much traction. I’m kind of referring back to Jodi Dean’s Why the Net is not a Public Sphere here, though I’ve never been entirely satisfied with it.

    There is a less fundamental argument about physical and temporal proximity to be had as well; our traditional conception of (and signifiers for) privacy are contingent on both, and our technological medium carries neither. Overhearing (and contextualizing, and sharing) gossip or creeping on a diary requires a certain immediacy, and that immediacy carries social pressure, neither of which is (currently?) being communicated effectively through the network.

    People try to apply existing social tools because they don’t have anything else that fits their model of interaction, and their model of interaction doesn’t fit the medium.

  3. Mads Kristensen

    Super interesting, Danah. I am just wondering what this line of thought does to the idea of ‘sharing’. You could argue that sharing something requires some sort of intimate context, ie someone you want to share something important with. Yet in our social media world sharing has become the equivalent of more or less through-through narrow-broadcasting. What’s your perspective on that? Any relation or relevance to the above? I’m really curious about it.

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