by JACOB SILVERMAN
Recently a friend related an eminently contemporary problem. Browsing Facebook one day, he received a notification. Facebook’s facial recognition algorithm had recognized someone he knew in a photo and wanted him to approve the suggested tag. Three issues immediately presented themselves: the photo was of his newborn child, he hadn’t uploaded the photo, and he didn’t want to contribute to his infant’s data trail. Yet it seemed that Facebook already “knew” who his daughter was, both in name and face.
There was a social component to this, too. Would he have to start telling friends not to post photos of his kid? What novel matters of propriety did new parents now have to negotiate? Was he giving into an uninformed, instinctual revulsion at the latest digital technology?
These questions weren’t easily dismissed, but something more complicated was at work — overlapping concerns about visibility, identity, a parent’s responsibility, the commoditization of everyday communications, and how difficult it can be to articulate the kind of harm being done here. In his dilemma, we can also see how privacy is no longer, as one popular definition has it, the ability to control what other people know about us. Instead, in recent years privacy has split along two lines: what humans know about us and what machines know about us.
The first kind of privacy, which you might call “personal privacy,” is the type with which we’re more familiar. This kind asks the question: what do other people know about me, especially people in my community? Personal privacy matters because we want to have some control over our identities, over our social lives, over our secrets and what is personal and meaningful to us. Privacy is not just about keeping information secret. It’s also about control and autonomy, about having the ability to disclose information to others when, where, and how you choose. This is a key part of intimacy, of having anything like a close relationship with another human being. A person could learn some of your most personal information by reading it in a digital profile, eavesdropping on a conversation, or rifling through your email. But this kind of information, sensitive or not, becomes more meaningful when it’s communicated between two people, in a shared moment of confidence. Disclosure is not just downloading personal data. It’s a social act that ties people together.
The other type of privacy is what I call “data privacy.” It asks the question: what do companies, governments, and their automated systems know about me? It also asks: what do they think of me? How are they judging me? These last questions are important — and while of course, we do ask these questions in more conventional social settings, increasingly it matters what distant databases and software programs think of us, what they have on us. Whether you’re marked as a threat to law enforcement, how much you pay for plane tickets, your level of insurance coverage, if you can get an Uber driver to show up at your location — all of these things now depend on data profiles tied to your real name and most intimate personal information. It is a reflection of what some scholars call your data self — the fragmented version of yourself that exists in all these data centers, spread between a thousand different interested parties and competing algorithms.
Which type of privacy matters more to you? They’re not mutually exclusive; rather, they’re closely bound together. But the first type is, understandably, the one most of us are familiar with. Even as many of us become used to exposing ourselves — whether deliberately by sharing personal information and photos online or simply by handing over access to our information for free Internet services — we still value some sense of autonomy. There’s a feeling that this hazy thing we call a self depends not just on a list of personal data and trivia but on having control over how we present ourselves, how we act as social beings.
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via 3 Quarks Daily