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Privacy is dead—or so we're told, both by those who would mourn the loss and by those who would dance on its grave. And the murderers aren't just the NSA and snooping corporations. We too have played a part in privacy's demise, through our embrace of mass exhibitionism. When hands are raised at a concert, they're holding cameras, ready to shoot and post to an ever-expanding array of social networks. When we cook a delicious meal, the thumbs type a tweet before the mouth gets a bite. "OK, Glass" summons a machine worn on the face to capture video, audio, and geographic location and then broadcast it to the world. With so many private moments now public, the reasoning goes, we must no longer value privacy.
But a human life is not a database, nor is privacy the mere act of keeping data about ourselves hidden. In reality, privacy operates not like a door that's kept either open or closed but like a fan dance, a seductive game of reveal and conceal.
By that standard, the explosion of personal information online is giving rise to new mysteries, new unknowns. When you post a photo on Instagram, it offers up not just answers but hints at new questions: Who were you with and why? What were you feeling? What happened between the updates, and why was it left out? Secrets, creative concealments, the spaces between posts—this is where privacy flourishes today.
Courtesy of Rosey Lakos and Jesse Crimes
Look at the behavior of teenagers, supposedly the ones among us who care least about privacy. Microsoft researcher danah boyd has investigated how they use social media; it turns out that teens are both very public and very private, often at the same time. In a behavior called whitewalling, users post to Facebook—sometimes in great detail — but then quickly delete everything, creating a blank timeline. That's a new form of privacy for the social media age: a mass release of information that eventually disappears. Boyd also describes "social steganography," in which teens use things like slang, inside jokes, and song lyrics to hide private messages in plain sight; one audience understands the meaning of a post while others (adults or more distant friends) scroll right by.
Implicit in the fan dance, though, is the ability to choose what to reveal and when. That is, real privacy is all about autonomy. And when corporations or governments have crossed a line in violating privacy, users haven't hesitated to speak up. Facebook, for example, triggered a backlash when it opted users into new sharing rules without their explicit consent. More generally, a recent Pew survey reported that 86 percent of Internet users say they've "taken steps online to remove or mask their digital footprints." And, of course, there is the scandal over US government spying through the NSA.
when you post a photo on instagram, it offers up not just answers but hints at new questions: who were you with and why? what was left out?
In its own way, the rise of publicness has allowed for privateness to become its own trend. In the film era, to photograph something conferred an importance on it. But today the ease and ubiquity of photography means documentation is far more the rule than the exception. It's gotten to the point where choosing not to photograph something conveys respect for a moment, imbues it with significance. Pretty soon we might realize that one of the Internet's favorite slogans can now be reversed: No pics or it didn't happen.
We think of privacy and publicity as being in conflict. Instead, like the fan dance, they're a mutually reinforcing system. Yes, we're more public than ever, with all the unevenly distributed harms and benefits that follow. But we can't do justice to that shift unless we drop the hyperbolic notion that privacy is in its death throes. If we want to understand privacy in the digital era, we need to recognize that publicity doesn't kill it. Rather, publicity depends on privacy—and vice versa.
