Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.Permutations of the Privacy Debate
The privacy-in-the-Internet-Age debate has certain spiritual overtones that make it a more uncomfortable topic than it could be. I was confronted with it by Tobias yesterday at Georg Zoche’s famous Arrabiata-International-Night and just finished reading Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger‘s Useful Void – The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing, so I feel I need to write to understand.
It seems that in the privacy debate we often do not distinguish between different strands of thinking and therefore do not allow for all possible permutations in our positions. So let me propose a first framework to disentangle the debate.
- the public-private debate addresses the question what importance we ascribe to the distinction between our public and private selfs. The distinction has been foregrounded by feminist theory as modern artefact, necessary if we assume that society is based on a contract between originally independent individuals. It constructs two different domains of life governed by different rules, biased against certain groups. It is a bourgeois concept insofar that it is a defensive right against the intrusion of the state and constitutive for communicative action in modern democratic thinking. With the transformation in how we imagine collective action (from contracts to networks, from constitutive to outcome-based legitimation, from function to process, government to governance) the public-private distinction, in theory, should be losing importance as a guiding principle. These ideas show up very early in the history of the Internet, think of JenniCam and has been mainstreamed with all types of myspaces and facebooks. However, many of us still feel very strongly about the distinction and feel by giving it up, we look into the abyss of absolute vulnerability.
- the data retention debate focuses on the question how much of our lives should be registered and for how long. Viktor makes the argument that “we should revive our society’s capacity to forget” by tagging data with expiration dates. I very much enjoyed Viktor’s article, because he focused only on one aspect of the debate (data retention) and therefore is able to offer actionable policy advice. However, his argument relies on the idea that because the human brain retains its sanity by forgetting and because societies in the past did not have the capacity to retain all data, we should make use of our technological capacity to forget. I think both can be challenged, (a) is the analogy between the function of the brain and how we deal with collective memory valid? – This leads to questions of Philosophy in Flesh, and (b) Should we be so luddite/conservative and institutionalize forgetting, just because we very not able to remember in the past (and it worked well for us)?
- The aesthetics of the naked self debate. Clearly, we feel uncomfortable or even violated when data about ourselves that does not put us in the best of lights is revealed. However, this might be not because of the over-stepping of the public-private divide, but because we are unhappy with the aesthetics of the projection. Think of Pamela and Tommy Lee (available at Amazon).
- The decontextualization debate. Analog life is contextual, while digital data can be re-mixed. This leads to drunken pirates losing their diplomas and Las Vegas judges to be fired for breaking off their feet in the prosecutor’s ass. We are still grappling with developing (legal) frameworks that allow us to contextualize the digital.
By untangling these strands in the privacy debate, we can differentiate our positions on the issue. One way is to then deal with them one-by-one, as suggested by Viktor, or to just allow more complexity into the debate. I, for example, am not concerned about the public-private distinction, but do think there are important issues in the data retention debate, and I believe that we need to become more sophisticated in how we deal with the aesthetics-of-our-naked-selfs issue and the decontextualization issue. Not sure this adds value to the discussion, but here it is.
