Stage-managing the most popular one-person show
Each time I try to compose a post for my philosophy class, I resolve not to discuss Facebook or Google this time. I keep mentioning them, using them as examples, to the point where one might think I spend all my time using one or both of those services. Not so. Not even close.
Wait, sorry, need to check Gmail on my Android phone….
Well, I will succeed in not mentioning Facebook and Google eventually. Not today. No, because for my second critical response, I am discussing “Friend Me if You Facebook: Generation Y and Performative Surveillance,” by E.J. Westlake. This article is in volume 52 of TDR: The Drama Review, available through Project MUSE (couldn’t find an openly-available copy, sorry). We will be discussing this during week eight of class.
This is an article that is exactly what it says on the tin (or title, as the case may be). Westlake discusses how Generation Y uses Facebook, arguing that members of older generations tend to be dismissive of Generation Y’s proactive use of Facebook, focusing on it only as a tool that promotes exhibitionism and apathy. At the same time, she examines how one’s activities on Facebook is a performance of the self, bringing us in some Erving Goffman for the theory side, which brings back memories of the first-year sociology course I took. Finally, Westlake also explores how this performance of self is mediated by Facebook’s enforcement of a panoptic sense of surveillance and self-policing, or what she terms performative surveillance.
Westlake begins with an anecdote about how she discovered the introduction of Facebook’s News Feed. I was aware that Facebook had not always had the News Feed, but having joined after its introduction, I’ve never been able to imagine Facebook without it, despite my dislike of its user interface design. Considering the outcry raised over Facebook’s privacy issues in the past few years, it was fascinating to read about how users objected to the News Feed (22). Can you imagine anyone doing that now? (My objections are purely from an interface perspective.) This alone is a useful reminder that time changes the perspective on everything, and that which we find unsettling or invasive at first may soon become the status quo.
Westlake singles out Facebook for analysis because of its insistence upon the convergence of online and offline geography. Although other services, such as MySpace, allow for the creation of subjectivities and a performance of self, Facebook’s ideology and structure encourages people to interact with other people in their real-world location (25). Westlake sees this as a way of fundamentally altering how we relate to each other, and she rejects the “prevailing attitudes of Baby Boomers and Generation X-ers that Generation Y is somehow socially and politically disengaged because of technology” (23). Why the difference in perspective? Westlake attributes this to the performance of self.
When we interact online, just as when we interact in person, we present a facet of ourselves based on our audience. We perform. Facebook is special because the dynamic, ongoing nature of our updates to our profiles means the performance itself is ongoing, so the selves we present are ever-changing. Moreover, “the predominantly Generation Y Facebook community uses Facebook to define the boundaries of normative behavior through unique performances of an online self” (23), so Facebook is a medium through which Generation Y is changing the standards of social interaction. As a result, instead of deviating from social norms by posting drunk photos, Facebook users “establish and reinforce social norms, but also resist being fixed as rigid, unchanging subjects” (23).
Consider this for a moment: every user’s Facebook profile is like a constantly-changing, continually-updated autobiography. Unlike a school yearbook or a memoir, written once and then fixed in text and left to moulder on a bookshelf, Facebook profiles are an ongoing presentation of ourselves in the moment. To a Facebook user, the idea that one’s profile would ever be frozen or left in stasis would be silly: change is constant and expected.
Westlake examines several ways in which people use Facebook as a performance. Fictional profiles—either impersonating real people or portraying fictional characters—are one example. I don’t pay attention to such profiles, but I found Westlake’s mention of them interesting because it’s an example of a use of Facebook that is non-normative, in the sense that this is not how Facebook expects one to use the service. Indeed, fake profiles are banned by the Terms of Use, and one of the self-policing surveillance/discipline actions Westlake notes is the reporting of such profiles:
Users can also police Facebook deviants by reporting inappropriate photographs, fake profiles, and vulgar Wall posts. Facebook has an elaborate Code of Conduct and encourages users to click on “Report Abuse” links on every page.… While users can conceivably create fake profiles based on anyone, fake profiles are rigorously policed on Facebook.… It takes only one user reporting a fake profile for the profile to be removed. (34)
As with Winokur’s critique of the Internet as a panopticon, there is not a bijective correspondence between this notion and Facebook, simply because of the differences in architecture. Nevertheless, it is clear that surveillance and self-surveillance is present. There is a certain amount of self-censorship at work. Most of us don’t post drunk photos:
While researchers in a recent University of Dayton study expressed concern over the fact that 8 percent of Facebook users surveyed reported exaggerating the amount of drinking or drug use in their profiles, what they don’t mention is the reverse: that an overwhelming majority of users do not exaggerate or highlight so-called deviant behavior. (32)
We are aware that others are going to view our profiles and judge us, so for the most part we curtail our activities—moderate our performance of self. I am very much aware of this in my own activities, not only when I post to Facebook, but when I tweet or write a blog post. The latter activity in particular is always interesting, since my father and my paternal grandparents read my blog, so there is always a part of me aware of that. Additionally, when I post something online, it is there forever. It might not go away, not even if I try to delete it. As I grow and mature, what I have written in the past might come back to haunt me, even if I don’t consider it “deviant” behaviour at the time I write. For example, while rummaging through my blog archives, I’ve discovered I once claimed to enjoy The Da Vinci Code, which is far from my current opinion (I guess this my equivalent of “Big Hair”). How we choose to deal with these snapshots of our past selves is an individual matter, although some, including Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, have suggested that some youth will change their names to escape the records of their online past. That is rather extreme in my case.
Facebook users also participate in the policing of others, as noted above in the case of fake profiles. In fact, Facebook relies on its users to self-police. No matter how many people it hires to process reports, it cannot possibly have enough people to scour all the posts and profiles created each day. Perhaps most importantly, Westlake notes that despite the community’s own role in policing such profiles, “users continue to create fake profiles, showing a willingness on the part of the Facebook community to play with the rules established by Facebook administrators” (35). However, she also notes that users will receive criticism for having too few or too many friends (36). Thus, although those foreign to Facebook often see it as something outside, something Other, which promotes deviance and exhibitionism, it is clear that there are norms within Facebook, maintained by the self-policing user base, and not following those norms is what earns censure: “Facebook is a forum for the policing and establishing of normative behavior, more than the imagined forum of deviant exhibitionism” (35).
Westlake is very persuasive. Maybe it’s because I am a member of Generation Y, and even if I don’t use Facebook with some of the passion or intensity that my peers do, I like it as a communication tool. Nevertheless, I appreciate that she has taken the time to view the service as a sign of the new present rather than a deviation from the old past. That Facebook is changing our interactions seems undeniable. However, unlike what some claim, I agree with Westlake that “Facebook is not a substitute for social interaction,” and
Generation Y … will take what older generations view as a social disadvantage and create new norms for performances of self, and these norms are likely to be established online as they are in face-to-face interaction. (31)
This seems to be a quieter form of revolution than the type we generally like to ascribe to the Internet. “I’m creating new norms for performances of self” just doesn’t have the same ring as, “Man, I’m rebelling against the Man, man. Down with the establishment!” does. But the Internet doesn’t have to be revolutionary all the time, or consistently loud in its revolutionary quality. Westlake has done what some journalists and scholars seem reluctant to do, which is treat Facebook and other network-related phenomena as something more than a passing fad or an unpleasant deviation from the norms of their society.
In her rejection of this perspective, Westlake is placing herself opposite journalists like Robert J. Samuelson, who calls the Internet “ExhibitioNet” which “has unleashed the greatest outburst of mass exhibitionism in human history” (31). This is reminiscent of our readings of Guy Debord’s ruminations on the spectacle. Do you think that our performances of self are a form of spectacle? If so, what does this say about the way we enforce and police performances according to emergent norms?
For some additional reading, I—well, I don’t have any reading. I do have two podcasts, a video, and an infographic though.
- Episode 67 of Spark has an interview with Paul Taylor, founder of Arcalife, a service that wants to preserve family history including social networking. Would you want family members to keep your Facebook profile around for posterity?
- Westlake also mentions that, “Unlike older people, Generation Y-ers may not understand the purpose of public protest and are not likely to march in the streets to voice their views,” but they do join Facebook groups in force (38). Spark interviewed an internet psychologist who created a fake petition group to see if people were just doing this for the sake of, well, joining petition groups.
- Joel Jacob posted this in one of our weekly discussion forums, but I shall share it again for those classmates who missed it and for my wider audience: “You need to get off Facebook” is a short video that seems to deliver a message opposite to Westlake’s thesis. It’s interesting to note that, unlike most of the opposition Westlake cites, this video is from a member of Generation Y.
- Lastly, Matt McKeon has an interactive infographic that visualizes the history of Facebook’s default privacy settings. Click on the chart to advance through the last five years and see how more and more of your personal data is available by default. If Facebook profiles are truly a performance of the self, it’s worth knowing who the audience is, no?
But wait, I have a bonus question! We often refer to the Internet as liberating or freedom-enhancing, especially for minorities or the oppressed. But is this the case? If Facebook establishes a new standard of normative behaviour through the performative surveillance of its users, does it also create exclusionary practices similar to those created by offline norms? How does this affect non-normative groups?
Your Internet may be monitored for quality control purposes
This is a critical response to David Lyon’s “The World Wide Web of Surveillance: The Internet and off-world power-flows,” published in the Spring 1998 issue of Information, Communication & Society. Those of you lucky enough to have a university account that has access to such things can find it there; those of you following along at home can read the earlier version presented at a Canadian Association for Information Science meeting in 1997.
That was the single most difficult aspect when considering my response to this reading: it was written in 1997. True, that’s only 13 years ago—but the World Wide Web itself is only 20 years old. That is pre-Google, the entity that has, perhaps more than any other Internet-based company, single-handedly changed the way we use the Web—not to mention introduced a suite of privacy and surveillance concerns that weren’t around in 1997. So as a technophile upstart who came to the Web in 2004 and writes in HTML5, I had to keep my reservations regarding the article’s age in check. After all, despite the changes since Lyon wrote this, most of the article is still valid. There are parts that read as outdated, and I’ll point those out when we get there. For now, let’s talk about surveillance.
Like everything else online, online surveillance emerges from a tradition of offline surveillance going back to ancient times. Not all surveillance is necessarily sinister or malign: Lyon uses censuses and population statistics (like birth rate) as examples of surveillance we generally consider acceptable (though if the recent debate around the long-form census shows anything, it’s that “acceptable” is always a matter of subjective degree). In more recent times, against the backdrop of democracy, surveillance is the turf of an eternal tug-of-war between politicians and law enforcement officers and the freedoms of the citizens of the democracy. Too much surveillance infringes on those freedoms, whereas too little surveillance hinders law enforcement and aids criminals. As always, it is a matter of balance.
Lyon looks at some of the initial fears regarding surveillance back when the Internet really was young, citing concerns that we would have an “Orwellian police states and Kafkaesque faceless bureaucratic machines” (93). He notes that time has not borne those fears out exactly (though sometimes I look askance at the photos of signs I see on UK metro stops). Instead, he says that there are “two major debates … concerning surveillance,” the first being the extent to which online surveillance differs qualitatively from offline (paper and bureaucracy) surveillance, the second being the extent to which Foucauldian theories are applicable to online surveillance (94).
If the differences were not as obvious in 1997, I think they are fairly obvious today: the network provides speed and data collation abilities far beyond what analog surveillance could ever achieve. However, it is also decentralized. So instead of having a single entity, like the government or a corporation, spying on the users of the Net, anyone with a computer might be able to spy on anyone else. So do we really have a “panopticon” in Foucault’s sense? For a really detailled look at that question, you might be interested in Mark Winokur’s article, which we read previously this week. In Lyon’s case, the answer is that the panopticon might be part of it, but there is more to the Internet and surveillance as well. Moving beyond the realm of surveillance as a form of discipline, he raises another Foucaldian idea, that of biopower, and proposes that it might fill some of the gaps left by the panoptic consideration of online surveillance.
Citing William Bogard, Lyon delineates a difference between the classical panopticon and what he terms “hyperpanoptics.” The former is “an architecture” that deals “with real time and physical space,” whereas in the digital world, “time is asynchronous and speed of flows is crucial, and … distance and proximity are blurred….” In the classical panopticon, prisoners couldn’t know if they were being watched at all times, but the model was such that they weren’t—that is, there would be one guard in the tower watching some prisoner. Online, however, this model strictly ported would break, because it is possible to watch everyone at once, provided your guard is a sophisticated signals intelligence network like Echelon (not to be confused with the fictional artificial intelligence, the Eschaton). Lyon calls this electronic solution to the limitations of surveillance the “mythical goal” of surveillance (101).
He doesn’t explicitly go on to connect biopower to this, but it seems like Lyon means for biopower to elevate the theories of online surveillance beyond the notion of surveillance-as-discipline. That is, we aren’t just being actively watched or monitored; long-term surveillance collects our data, our patterns and behaviours and habits, and uses that data to build profiles of people and populations. The purpose of such data mining can range from law enforcement to marketing, but it all relates back to biopower, to the focus on human particulars. Facebook, which I’m sure Lyon would have mentioned were it around in 1997, is probably the paradigm case here. We share so much personal information with Facebook, and so it has this massive database of human relationships at its fingertips. It knows who talks to whom, who went to school with whom, who works with whom, etc. Caladan was ruled with sea power, and on Arrakis it was desert power; with the Internet, he or she who has biopower wins the day.
For me, however, the most interesting part of Lyon’s article is how he carefully differentiates between surveillance and privacy. The two terms are not synonymous, and privacy is but one concern related to surveillance. Lyon is careful to point out that surveillance can also cause social division and inequality on a scale beyond individual invasions of privacy. He obviously considers these coextensive, for he laments, “some theorists seem so concerned with the one that they ignore or minimize the significance of the other” (99). I myself must confess that often I focus on invasions of privacy to the exclusion of social inequality, probably because as a white middle-class male, I tend not to experience that inequality directly; I mistakenly view my privileged status as the normative experience across society. So it is good to be reminded of such things.
And once reminded, how can you really forget? Look no farther than the Great Firewall of China. This is a country with more people online than the United States (let alone Canada) has in its entirety. Yet owing to the regime’s control of access to the larger Web, the population receives an experience online that is fundamentally different from what we see in our countries. It is a little mind-boggling.
When it comes to privacy, Facebook offers us plenty of examples, notably Facebook Beacon. Our own privacy commissioner of Canada has reviewed Facebook’s policies and found it wanting. It is important to note that this is not necessarily a sign that Facebook is “being evil,” as privacy issues are complex, and Facebook is as much a newcomer to these waters as we are. Nevertheless, it is clear that corporations stand to gain enormous benefits from the data to which they have access.
I should hope that we all have at least a basic understanding of the privacy implications of surfing the Web, more so than the average user might have had in 1997. Lyon’s article is understandably a product of its time; the Clipper Chip project he mentions was dead on arrival. Historically, the governments‘ attempts to mix secrecy with control over encryption have failed miserably (keeping your cryptography standard classified so it can’t be peer reviewed is just asking for trouble). Keep in mind that this article also predates the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. While the US has not established a One World Encryption, those attacks led to the passing of the USA PATRIOT Act, and our own Anti-terrorism Act here in Canada. In fact, Lakehead University’s Faculty Association actually objected to the university’s use of Gmail as the basis for our new email system, on the grounds that Google would be subject to US privacy laws. So online surveillance has only become more complicated since 1998, not less.
So here are some links, because links are cool (on the scale of coolness, links are slightly cooler than fezzes but nowhere near as cool as bow ties):
- Of course, I’m going to link you to Spark, because it is seriously one of my favourite programs.
- Interview with Evgeny Morozov on Internet and repression
- Google Street View has been a fairly non-controversial subject here (aside from some naughty WiFi data sniffing), so it might interest you to learn about how Google did Street View in Germany.
- Though not necessarily surveillance per se, Episode 101 talks about workplace Internet filtering, which is related to Lyon’s brief discussion of how workplaces will monitor one’s Internet usage.
- For more on Facebook privacy concerns, I refer you to Rocketboom for May 17, 2010.
- The above video mentions Diaspora, a self-labelled “open alternative to Facebook” that is currently in alpha stage. Is it truly going to resolve the issues around Facebook and online surveillance? (Something about Diaspora that has nothing to do with online surveillance but is really cool is that its “gender” field is a text input. This is slightly controversial owing to issues of data integrity, and I’ll be interested in exploring this when we get to the part of the course that deals with gender and sex online.)
In his conclusion, Lyon says that
until the inequality-reinforcing and personhood-threatening aspects of contemporary surveillance are seen together, and until these dimensions are understood in relation to the virtualizing of surveillance, the real issues of contemporary surveillance will continue to elude us. (103)
This seems like a great starting point for discussion. I happen to agree with Lyon that these two issues (social inequality and invasion of privacy) are related, not disjoint, aspects of online surveillance (feel free to let me know if you think otherwise). If this is the case, how can we see these as a unified issue, and do existing theories (e.g., Foucauldian) allow for this, or do we need something else? Have we made much progress in this since 1997?
Online/Offline is a false dichotomy
Two months ago I read The Numerati, in which Stephen Baker discusses how technology—particularly the Internet—is affecting marketing techniques and how businesses and individuals manage their data. Now that we have the tools and understanding to mathematically model more behaviour than ever before, there’s a new group of people—the eponymous Numerati—at the forefront of this information revolution.
One of the concerns Baker briefly addresses is privacy. On the Internet, this has always been an issue, but the surge in popularity of social networking this year makes it even more relevant. MySpace and Facebook have made headlines with the Lori Drew case and the launch of identity management Facebook Connect.1 What was once a matter of “privacy” is now a question of the most appropriate mechanism for managing the convergence of one’s offline and online personae.
And I can’t help but feel that some people are missing the point.
What is Privacy?
Like “Web 2.0”, we tend to throw the term “privacy” around quite a bit without much thought to what we actually want when we demand it. Does this merely mean we want our bank account details safe? Or do we actually want a guarantee of anonymity (if we choose it)? Is our personal data only private if we keep it secret, or is it still private if we share it with other people (such as friends or corporations) as long as it isn’t available to the general public?
Let’s face it though: in the evanescent medium of the Internet, any strict definitions regularly become obsolete. So instead, let’s define privacy as a mode of operation rather than a state of being. Online, privacy is more an ability of a user to control how his or her personal data is distributed. Privacy settings on web sites are an excellent example of this mode of operation: the web site gives the user the choice of what to reveal.
But We Just Wanna Have Fun
Then apparently you haven’t heard the news: the Internets are serious businesses. This is hard for many people to accept—it’s so easy to go online, create a fake identity, and begin fooling around. Yet at its core, the Internet is not a fictitious world or some sort of MMORPG. While you can often assume the cloak of anonymity,2 increasingly services expect you to dole out personal details and geographical information.
I can understand why this has privacy advocates concerned. It won’t be long, they argue, before everyone is chipped with evil, insecure RFID devices that allow the Google Overlords to track our every movement and even read our minds, right? After all, as soon as we tell a service on the Internet not only who we are, but where we live, it’s only a matter of time before an axe murderer shows up at our door, right?
It’s good to be wary and vigilant of flagrant violations of one’s privacy. However, these sort of overreactions are indicative, in my opinion, of a misunderstanding of the Internet as a communication medium. In that sense, the Internet really is something new. We’ve never had a communication medium quite like it. The Internet’s effect on society is tantamount to that of the printing press on fifteenth century European society—but it is also so much more. The Internet is both a library and a conference centre. When people pull out their mobile phones and say, “This is my office,” they aren’t necessarily joking.
The true potential of the Internet will never be realized unless we accept that geostamping is as much of a necessity as timestamping. Since the inception of the Internet, content creators regularly date the work they publish online—yet only recently have we begun tagging that work with geographical information. Now websites like Flickr can automatically geostamp your photos using the information embedded into the uploaded photograph. While watchdogs call that a privacy violation, I call that awesome. (And you can turn it off if you don’t like it.)
Knowledge Is Slavery
The counterargument to handing all our data over to the Google Overlords is to trot out George Orwell’s 1984 and staple the adjective “Orwellian” to everything. Now, I admit I often worry about that. Giving Google my personal information is one of my favourite pastimes, but is it a dangerous pastime? Is Google going to start editing the Internet to retcon reality?
The short answer is: no. The explanation to the short answer is: you won’t let them—at least, I hope.
See, the thing about 1984 is that Orwell wasn’t cautioning us against “Big Brother” type dystopian societies—most of us were already against those at the time. He was cautioning us that those sort of societies spring up because we don’t do anything about it. That message is kind of hitting home after recent events in Canada … but anyway, I digress.
My point is that there’s still plenty of room on the Internet for individuals and countercultures to survive. That’s the beauty of the Internet: as long as you have the technology, you can rebuild it, recreate it, and make it better than it was before. You only run into problems when you have a government, like China, that begins dictating what you can or can’t do when you browse the Internet and enforce it technologically. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, however, but that was not an isolated incident in China—that sort of government restriction was present in every part of the lives of Chinese citizens. Similarly, if we see the inception of an “Orwellian Internet”, it will happpen because we the people have sold out.
In short, Orwellian society begets Orwellian Internet, not the other way around. Orwellian. Orwellian. Orwellian.
Great adjective.
Wait, You‘re Still Reading This?
I would recommend The Numerati to everyone, not just people with an interest in this field. The book is very short and doesn’t go into the mathematical specifics behind this statistical analysis—Baker’s a business writer, not a math geek like me—so it’s quite understandable to laypeople. In his conclusion, Baker says:
So we’re going to have to reevaluate our ideas about privacy and secrets … until recently, our secrets were scattered…. Most of them, if we played it right, didn’t mingle much. Unless a detective was on the case, the bits of information didn’t find each other. Now they can and they will.
This can be scary. No doubt it will tempt a few of us to turn away from the data-spewing world altogether. Some will tiptoe around the Internet, if they venture there at all….
But with a bit of knowledge, we can turn these tools to our advantage. You may not have noticed, but as we make our way in these pages from the snooping workplace to the laboratories of love, we gradually evolve from data serfs into data masters…. We’re appealing to the science of the Numerati to protect us from falls and alert us before strokes and heart attacks…. The point is, these statistical tools are going to be quietly assuming more and more power in our lives. We might as well learn how to grab the controls and use them for [our] own interests. (204-5)
Before that, Baker makes another statement that pretty much sums up my entire view toward privacy: “The personal data can be shared but not the identity” (204). How many of you have done anonymous surveys, or checked off a box that says, “Yes, you can share my data as long as you don’t associate with my identity”? For those of you that haven’t—are you sure? How many of you honestly read through those tiresome EULAs that accompany any of the software you install—many of those include clauses that permit the software to anonymously report data about how you use the software.
As Baker explains, this sort of data is neither good nor bad. What matters is who uses it and how they use it. Unless you become a hermit3, achieving total privacy is impractical. So rather than run from the Google overlords, these Numerati, learn about them. Learn what they do with your data, and be vigilant in how you manage your online identity.
There are risks associated with any venture, and the Internet is no different in this case. Every time you connect your computer to it, you take the risk that you’ll inadvertently download a virus or be deluged with spam. But like many risky ventures, I think the Internet is worth that risk.
The debate over privacy should not be about how to keep your secrets—well, secret. That is a lost cause. Instead, the debate should be over how best to manage those secrets, and how to make sure our personal data is used to benefit us rather than exploit us.
Google Chrome, Part 2: All Your Base Are Belong to Google
Yesterday, I explained why I was excited about Google getting into the browser game. Of course, no new Google venture is complete without some people taking issue with Google’s privacy policies. In this case, the controversy was around Google Chrome’s EULA, specifically section 11.1. Now, since everything on the Internet happens at the speed of light, Google has already changed the wording of that clause and applied it retroactively, claiming that it was all a mistake by the lawyers behind the curtain. However, this incident reminds us of just how much data Google collects, not to mention privacy issues online as a whole.
I should begin with the disclaimer that I am not a Google fanboy. I love some of Google’s services—I use Gmail, although I prefer to check my mail through Mozilla Thunderbird’s interface, and Google Calendar is my favourite calendar application. However, I’m perfectly willing to criticize Google. I try not to be a fanboy of anything, but if I were, I‘d be a Joss Whedon fanboy. So I’m going to hijack this post to mention that the Dr. Horrible soundtrack is available for purchase on iTunes. That is all.
The Internet is transforming us into a global village as Marshall McLuhan predicted. More and more information concerning our offline personae is being stored in a digital form and then transferred all around the world, whether we know of it or not. Companies that exist primarily to gather data (like Google, a search engine company) always want more. How much are we willing to give?
When addressing the issue of privacy on the Internet, I’ve decided to tackle four questions. Firstly, what do we want when we yell “privacy!” on forums and blogs? It’s a word, but what does it mean? Next, what criteria should we use to determine which institutions to trust with our private data? And who is to blame when that data gets leaked or shared with third parties? Lastly, let’s put on our pragmatist caps and consider the reality of the Internet today: what’s feasible, and what will require major paradigm shifts to accomplish?
I Have Everything to Hide
A typical retort to those who lament the loss of privacy in everyday life is, “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, then you should have nothing to hide.” No one’s perfect though, and we all have things we want to hide. That’s why most browsers, including Google Chrome, have some sort of stealth mode (or “porn mode”) that doesn’t record what you’re doing. Everyone can have legitimate reasons for keeping secrets. The point of privacy is to present people with choice: an individual should have the choice of whether or not to reveal his or her private information, right?
But what’s private to us? Well, if anonymity is your goal, then probably everything except a pseudonym, maybe your gender. The Internet is increasingly critical to offline applications, however, and anonymity is no longer always an option. Sure, it’s possible to establish an ephemeral blog with no personally-identifiable information available to the public. However, the site will record your computer’s IP address, which in turn can be traced back (in most cases) to you. Even if you use a public computer, you’ll probably have to give an email address that could be traced back to you—you could use a fake address, but then you‘d have no way of receiving legitimate communications.
As the Internet evolves, it begins connecting our offline personae with our online ones. No longer is the Internet just a network on which we push emails back and forth. Now we’re uploading videos, torrenting television programs, tweeting, blogging, using Facebook—much of this relying on our own offline identities to make it relevant. When I update my Twitter status, it shows up on Facebook and on the homepage of my website. People who want to know what I am doing can look at my status.
But if one is not careful, too much information can lead to problems. Put your credit card number in the wrong form, and suddenly someone has stolen your identity. These are real problems that we as a society are going to have to solve. We have to give our private data to someone, but to whom?
Sell Your Soul For a Fiddle
How do you decide if a website is trustworthy? Friends‘ reviews? Newspaper articles? The number of people on the site? Which services deserve to store our private information, and which ones are untrustworthy for one reason or another?
If you have a bank account, then you probably have access to your finances online. Your bank stores massive amounts of personal information about you from your name to your credit history. What makes a bank more trustworthy than Google? Companies often try to sell themselves by promoting how much experience they’ve had, how long they‘ve been around. My bank, Bank of Montreal, is Canada’s oldest bank, founded in 1817. That’s much older than Google, which will be celebrating its tenth birthday in three days! If age is a factor, then my bank must be a more appropriate institution to trust with my data.
Banks don’t have the best track record for keeping private information private, however. It seems like every couple of months there’s another article in the newspaper about one bank or another misplacing or accidentally leaking the private information of thousands of people. Whoa. When was the last time Google did that? In July there was some concern when a court ordered Google-owned YouTube to hand over some information to Viacom. YouTube’s handling of the situation seems to indicate that Google has our privacy on its mind. And that makes sense. Google is a business as much as banks are, and no business wants to become notorious for disclosing private data.
ScapeGoogle?
So when our data does get disclosed, who is to blame? In the case of accidental leaks, the company often hits the age-old tome of excuses to produce classics like, “The postal service lost the package containing the data,” or “An employee forgot to clean sensitive data off his or her thumb drive before giving it away.” We are all human1; we make mistakes.
If the court orders the company to share the information with a third party, then we blame the government. And this is an important point: even in so-called free societies, legislation exists that gives the government access to data you store with private companies. If the U.S. government demands that Google hand over some of its data, there is nothing much Google can do about it. Google’s lawyers can fight the case in court, sure, but in the end, if the government wins the case, then it’s not Google’s fault that the government has that power. That is the price Google pays for operating in such deprived countries, much like Google’s self-imposed censorship is the price it pays for operating in China.
Thanks to the networked nature of the Internet, this creates headaches for people who don’t even live in the United States. Any data you send to Google’s servers is going to end up at a machine located in the U.S. at some point, which makes it accessible to the U.S. government. Avoiding such an eventuality requires a great deal of effort2. So the options become just accept the inevitable or boycott Google and its ilk3
Let’s All Go Amish
Boycotting Google is an acceptable, if extreme, method of protecting one’s privacy. However, it is impractical to boycott every possible source of privacy infringement. I suppose that one could cut up one’s credit cards, debit cards, government-issued IDs, etc. There are people who do this—but they are not a majority. Most people accept that some level of compromise is required to keep up with the relentless march of technology.
Ah, now the real demon comes to light: technology is evil! Mmm … not so much. We could destroy all of our advanced technology, but that doesn’t eliminate our privacy concerns. Also, it would utterly wreck civilization as we know it—you can go ahead and claim that a more pastoral existence is the paradise humanity requires, but that’s beyond the scope of this entry. The reality is, we are dependent on our technology, and that dependence comes with a price.
Be careful with your private information, of course. You’re going to have to give it out eventually. Be frugal about to whom you give it out. Tools like Facebook are not inherently dangerous; it all comes down to how you use them4
If you really are bothered by how society treats privacy these days, then make noise. Don’t just blog ineffectually about it like I am—write a letter to your representative of government (if you live in a “democracy”), form activist groups, make T-shirts, make pies … whatever it takes. Fight for change.
Me, I’m more worried about tethered appliances (such as the iPhone) and companies having the ability to remotely terminate products we “buy” as opposed to the data on those devices. But that’s an issue for another day.
I surrender. Now stop sending me emails.
Great Bird of the Galaxy, forgive me.
It was just a matter of time, of course. My willpower is far from legendary or anything, and I knew that I was going to “cave”, as Cortney so eloquently puts it, sometime or another—I fully intended to, since once I‘m done high school I’d like to preserve my connections with my friends through whatever means available. And, as much as I hate to admit it, social networking sites help.
So I joined Facebook.
That’s right. I’m tired of those snarky little “I’ve added you as a friend on Facebook…” emails finding their way into my inbox, begging me to get an account. 
Fine. I surrender. Now stop sending me emails. (I have a feeling I‘m going to continue getting them anyway, since that’s the nature of the beast).
However, an interestingly paranoid Orwellian thought occurred to me. As our technology increases, the government institutes increasingly complex methods of keeping track of us. The day is not far off when some sort of “national ID” system will be implemented. We already have several numbers associated with us—driver’s licence, SIN, health card, etc. Naturally people start to get paranoid about the government having access to all our private information.
Yet most people have no problem giving out their private information to sites like Facebook. So this begs the question: what if a site, like Facebook, isn’t actually run by a private corporation? What if it’s a front for the government, a way of clandestinely gathering people’s private information? Someone in the government will eventually wake up and do this, if it isn’t already being done. It’s a great method of data-mining your citizens without their knowledge. After all, who are you going to trust? Facebook, or the government?
Facebook, obviously, because their lovely little “JOIN OUR SITE” emails means they care. So much. 
And they don’t charge you taxes, which I suppose contributes.
Note this well: I surrendered to Facebook. But I will never, ever join MySpace so long as there is a speck of breath left in this body. As far as I’m concerned, MySpace is still a scourge, a blight on the Internet, and its time will come. Until then, I’m just going to continue ignoring it and block all those idiots who try to hotlink my smilies.
