Moderator: danah boyd Researcher, Microsoft Research

Judith Donath MIT Media Laboratory

Alice Marwick PhD Candidate, New York University

Siva Vaidhyanathan Assoc Professor, University of Virginia

danah boyd:

It’s great to do a panel on privacy as you’re getting flashed with cameras.

We have different concepts of what we believe is privacy. We need to have a conversation between what academics are doing and what businesses are doing. Privacy is not a static concept. There are broader terms with private and

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

Writing a book called The Googlization of Everything. There are many transactions that happen between us and Google. Privacy is something that gets discussed quite a bit. Two annoying assumptions.

Privacy is NOT the opposite of publicity. Just because we put aspects of our lives on our sites, it doesn’t mean that we are not concerned with what we DON’T share. Just because you share, doesn’t mean you lose your right to privacy.

Privacy is NOT a substance that can be measured or bartered away. It assumes that people can break off a little bit of privacy and give it away. Privacy is NOT a substance. It means MANY more things in various contexts. It’s a bad word for what we mean because we don’t have a better word for what we mean.

Alice Marwick:

Dissertation of the effect of social media on social status. There is a positive value to publicness. There is a value to participating in conversations. Twitter is a series of conversations that add value when you participate. All that information can be aggregated that couldn’t before and it creates profiles that could be very valuable.

Judith Donath:

Teach at MIT Media Lab. How can we make visualization of ourselves based on our online persona. Online, history is the equivalent of the body. By creating this body, that brings the notion of control. The idea of private is always in opposition to public. This opens up a HUGE number of questions regarding privacy. Biggest issues: It’s always hard to know how others see you. When you’re in a restaurant, you can overhear conversations, but the social norms say that you ignore them and pretend that you can’t hear them. You don’t butt into their conversation. We need to develop the technologies to give ourselves a digital “mirror” of ourselves. We can see what kind of trails that we’ve left behind.

danah boyd:

What does it mean that we have to do with scale? We’re seeing a scale of publicity that we’ve never seen before. It seems like the scale of privacy is going in the opposite direction.

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

The biggest change is not purely economical. It has more a shift in political views. There are SO many rewards for people who can gather our preferences. They also want to target us in the aggregate. There is also a steady erosion or comfort level in privacy. Between 1973 to 1976, people were very worried about their right of privacy. They wanted to protect our privacy against the state. Most of those protections were undermined by the Patriot Act. Since the 70’s we’ve taken this privacy for granted. We need to be worried about businesses that vacuum up our information can sell it to other businesses or even the government.

Judith Donath:

It should be easier for people to see what sort of information people are leaving behind. The privacy that people are trading is very abstract to them. You should be able to see that in person.Just like you take care of how you dress, you should be able to see your online “body.” We need data self-awareness.

It’s very hard to have a real historical perspective of what is normal. Historically, people who lived in smaller villages had almost NO privacy at all. If you leave technology aside, then we have MUCH more privacy than we had before, but we were isolated society. This big privacy is a RECENT occurrence. Now, everything has a RECORD of what has happened.

danah boyd:

Most of her students felt like their homes were NOT a private place. They actually felt like the Internet felt MORE private because they had more control.

Alice Marwick:

Context is the KEY of what we need to be talking about in regards to privacy. If you tell your doctor, you assume there is privacy. The norms that govern each space are what we expect. Technologies are embedded into these larger systems, but technology can make things seep into different contexts.

We should have access to our Choice Point profiles. Is the burden on the individual or on the companies. The default should be that people shouldn’t share information.

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

These days, personal information is a form of currency. Shouldn’t I have some stake in the currency that I’m creating? I do expect to at least be aware of the extent of which my information has been used and abused. The tech elite are adept at managing our online personas. We have to worry about those who are incapable or unaware of how to manage their online personas. We need to publicly design a series of norms, laws and tech to give NORMAL people some measure of control.

Judith Donath:

The things that you put online can be taken out of context not only now, but twenty years from now. We are living in a world in which EVERYTHING is moving out of context. There is so much data about so many people in so many ways that it is FORCING tolerance. As much as we are worried about privacy, we should also celebrate. We are getting a large public space where the norms are very broad.

It’s useful to separate Large Scale Institutional Control from the sphere of privacy. The other scale is the privacy around personal presentation of self. There are a lot of ways that we control our social face. You wouldn’t brag about your vacation to a financially struggling friend.

danah boyd:

Privacy is currency is a social sense as well. How do we negotiate the idea that sometimes this currency is to our advantage. How do we deal with these contexts?

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

Teach a class called Privacy and Surveillance. He assigns them to read Jane Jacobs. People walking their dog and looking after each other’s children can make people be better to each other. There is a certain level of surveillance that we would want to invite into our lives. You share certain things with your neighbor because there is a benefit to it. When I trade with Amazon, the only reciprocity is that I can choose another vendor. There is NO reciprocity with the State. These interactions can be very healthy, but it’s really hard to distill into a bumper sticker. Reciprocity NOW is just not going to sell.

Alice Marwick:

The social face that you have on LinkedIn is DIFFERENT than the face you have on Facebook.

danah boyd:

There are social situations where reciprocity is not true is celebrity. We can know a lot about celebrities without them knowing about us. We have a similar situation with people who we follow who don’t follow us.

Alice Marwick:

The relationships that you FEEL that you have with celebrities is something that she studies. Your audience is ALWAYS your audience. There is always an unequal relationship there. This idea has trickled down to all levels, even if you have a blog with only six readers. This culture of publicity has come to many more people.

Judith Donath:

How do you have a large society that decides what the norms are. You have a society of millions of people who can’t decide on their norms with millions of people. Fame is the flip-side of privacy. What is the value of the attention that is paid to us? What are the economics of the privacy that you are giving up? How much do you value the attention that people pay attention to you?:

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

There is no zero sum between privacy. We should not assume that we give up the right to protect our own diginity when we become famous. It’s like fame make people less of a person to us. Any one of us can ridicule and harm any other of us with a small device in our pocket.

danah boyd:

Young people negotiate privacy differently with different people. They will trick the system because they want their own privacy. They will lie about the year of their birth, but they will always give the accurate birth date because they want their friends to wish them a happy birthday.

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

The contract of privacy with the companies online is a one-way and you can’t change it. The Terms of Service are so vague and opaque. They have tried to make them clear, but it’s not perfect.

Judith Donath:

What does it look like if you aggregate ALL the data about you online? It’s a beautiful portrait of you, but it’s not something that you’ve been able to see or look at.

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

These big firms can change their Terms of Service overnight. They don’t give you a chance to opt out.