Why People Only Care About Privacy in the Private Sphere

Introduction

Privacy in the Private Sphere

Privacy in the Public Sphere

This extreme sense of personal privacy does not seem to translate well into more public aspects of the internet realm. To be sure, no one likes the idea that corporations or governments looking into their internet activities. I’m sure most people would prefer to have all the services they currently have without any of the surveillance. Yet, even when we know the surveillance is there, few of us are deleting our facebooks and gmail accounts or trading in our iphones. Instead, most people seem to shrug and say, “well, that’s not ideal, but it doesn’t affect me.”

And that’s just it. The difference between our few close associates and the entire corporate and governmental world seeing our information is that one has direct consequences and a direct effect on our relationships with the people that matter to us, and the other, at least in most of our minds, has no negative effect at all beyond the spying itself. After all, why should it matter that our data is being sold to corporations? They don’t know me, and they have no effect on my life. The most they can do is throw ads my way for products I’m more likely to want. Having grown up in a web society where ads are inevitable, it seems almost a benefit to have advertisers that know enough about me to only show me things I might actually want. And governments? Sure, that’s a little creepier, but I’m not involved in anything illegal and I have nothing to hide, so while it may affect a few criminals to have their information made available to governments, the rest of us innocent people have nothing to worry about and probably aren’t even being spied on all that much.

In truth, I think the issue is that most of us see the world in terms of individuals, with ourselves at the center. We don’t think about the society we’re building; we don’t think about the value of the abstract privacy we’re losing; we don’t think about the tyranny we are potentially running head-long into. We don’t think about the control we’re giving up, likely because few of us actually exercise as much control over or lives as we like to think and when we do, we do so absentmindedly. Instead, we think about what others do in terms of their consequences on us. We wouldn’t want our spouses looking into facebook browsing histories or have had our parents reading our messages to friends or have our employers checking out our spring break photos and status updates about work, because we recognize the power we’d lose there. We recognize that giving away our privacy in that respect could have immediate and serious consequences for us, and would subsequently either limit our ability to use that social medium or limit our activities outside it.

To most of us, I think the consequences of allowing the government or corporations to spy on us are much less real. As long as we’re not involved in anything illegal, we think that if the government has access to our data, nothing happens to us. With corporations, we feel there is even less possibility of consequences from spying. We don’t see how much control governments and corporations are gaining from this spying, because see how little we ourselves as individuals are losing in our own minds. Most of us are horrified when presented in books with a society like the one in 1984, yet few of us realize that our attitudes about privacy today may lead us to a society very much like it.

You do not discuss the difference between this form of surveillance among acquaintances, which results from sharing with "friends," and the forms of surveillance that result from sharing with "friends" by storing everything in one great big database operated for profit by a thug who is no one's "friend." By failing to draw this distinction, you prevent the reader from focusing on the actual harm done by the technology actually in use.

Turning from substance to composition, the most useful form of improvement here would be to tighten the organization. Your outline isn't apparent to the reader, who is led over some ground twice, while other steps are taken invisibly, between the sentences rather than in them. A rewrite based on an edited outline, intended to tighten the sequence in which you make your points, would probably result in significant shortening, by a quarter to a third, which would give you space for some of the propositions not now included.

Spying in the Social Network

-- By VanessaWheeler - 16 Oct 2012

One recurrent theme in our class discussions has been musing over the shadowing spying function of the most popular social tools, notably google and facebook, which the vast majority of us use on a regular basis. The biggest question—why would we willingly and happily facilitate the wholesale surveillance, collection, and selling for profit of our personal information, preferences, and connections—has been touched on several times, without any particularly satisfying answers. Perhaps because we don’t know just how spied on we are? This is a possibility; however, it seems a weak explanation when our reaction, even when told of the extent of the spying, is to continue to participate in the process. Could it be because we are now all so linked into the facebook social network that we need it in order to stay in touch with our contacts? This is also unlikely in the age of cell phones, when we can contact anyone we truly care about at the push of a button (and let’s face it, if you don’t have and haven’t gotten the contact information of one of your facebook friend’s yet, they probably aren’t too essential to your daily life). So why do we continue to post our personal information, our photos, our relationships, and our preferences on facebook at all when we know that the moment that information hits our timeline, we completely lose control of it? I have a theory: it’s because as much as we don’t like the idea of facebook execs, advertising specialists, and governmental agencies monitoring our data, we like even less the idea of giving up our own newfound ability to spy on those that matter to us.

For all the speculation on the spying that is conducted by third parties, I think facebook’s greatest social function is in allowing ordinary people to spy on each other. With the click of a mouse, we can see what our best friends have been up to (and whether or not they have been inviting you to their social functions), who has been friending our significant others and posting on their walls, whether or not that new person you’re interested in is straight or gay, single or in a relationship. Parents can peruse their children’s photos, searching for all the information left out of conversations, peers can keep tabs on what their friends and intimates have been up to, and with the unfortunate and incautious, employers can even do a little background research on prospective new hires. Sure, it is possible to limit other people’s access to sections of your wall, but often it seems like too much of a hassle to specifically tailor your facebook to allow or prevent each person properly, and many of us probably aren’t as careful in that as we’d want to be anyway.

Facebook allows us with an easier insight into the people that concern us than any other social tool in history. My guess as to why we’re willing to accept the admittedly disturbing downside of potential spying by unseen commercial or governmental parties is that doing so allows us to act as spies ourselves. We consider the possibility that anyone would want to spy on us minimal—we haven’t done anything worth spying on and don’t really plan to anytime soon, so no one’s going to care—and our own desire to spy on those we actually know is immediate and easily satisfied.

In fact, there is likely a hugely profitable untapped market created by facebook: the selling of a person’s information and social networking activity to their significant other. Just as facebook can compile data on what a person has been looking at and how long to sell to advertisers, it could almost certainly just as profitably sell such information to an individual’s significant other. After all, I would be willing to bet that there is any number of husbands or wives who, if they could do so secretly, would be quite eager to know whose pages their significant other had been looking at, how frequently and for how long. I would also be willing to bet that any number of parents would be interested in having a list of their children’s friends or knowing what kind of pages they’ve been looking at. Facebook could easily do this; we willingly gave them our information, even when they smirkingly told us that they would take the rights to it. Yet, they won’t. Such a business would in the short-term likely be extremely profitable for facebook, but in the long-term, should it become well-known what was happening, would also probably be the end of facebook.

While the average person almost certainly takes an interest in being able to spy on their loved ones and would almost certainly (though guiltily) take that spying a little farther if they could, they would also almost certainly get rid of their facebook at long last if it became apparent their loved ones could do the same. It seems apparent that we all value the ability to keep track of the people in our lives to some degree and more than we do our ability to completely protect our own privacy from unknown forces. Yet, I would guess that our curiosity as to others has its own shadow function: a desire to hide certain things, especially our own spying, from anyone who actually knows us or would have some personal stake in what we did.

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