Posts Tagged ‘online privacy’
Privacy and the currency of disclosure on social networks
January 15th, 2010
Comments by Mark Zuckerman, founder of social network Facebook, have reignited the debate on the value of individual privacy, an argument expanded in an elegant blog post by Kieron O’Hara, senior research fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
Kieron argues that privacy is actually essential, not only for the individual to act freely but also for society to function effectively. While his argument addresses broader issues than the impact of social networks, it acts perfectly as a test for these communities.
Social networks redefine the notions of individual privacy. We join tribes of people who we may have never met and who do not “belong” to our physical community. Our individuality is reshaped as we adopt new or different personas to mesh with the norms of these groups and to engage successfully with these tribes, we need to disclose ‘personal’ information.
In these exchanges, the essential, private “me” is revealed to be a chimera. Online, we are who we choose to be and we do so because it a benefit to aspects of our multi-faceted selves, and to the communities we belong to. The selective disclosures we make blur the line between private and public spheres in positive ways for both us as individuals (playing the game) and our communities.
Of course, communities are not simply atomised “game players”; they are also host to business entities, and the individuals who play the role of corporate sentinels. Communities have swiftly educated companies who thought that they could hide their commercial purpose and the sentinels also find that the selfish, disingenuous strategy has no place in these open, sharing groups.
In this sense, communities are self-healing and corrosive activity, which damages the tribal members and the tribe as a group is kept to a minimum. Information is exchanged “on my terms”.
The isolated, private individual whose engagement is limited mainly to passive adoption of social and commercial transmission is the ideal consumer unit. Association with social networks, with a subscription paid in the currency of disclosure, is clearly a benefit to both individual and community, offering multiple reference points for informed choice.
Does the Zuckerman imperative then present challenges to the legal concept of “reasonable expectation of privacy”? Responsible consent informs this challenge and there is little doubt that unwitting disclosure of personal data by an individual – and its misuse by third parties – would be deemed unreasonable. If the agent enabling that misuse is a commercial entity, like Facebook, then the consequences for that company would be terminal.
Facebook’s business strategy is almost wholly dependent upon the currency of disclosure. It is in Zuckerman’s interests, and indeed all those leaders of social networks, to ensure that this currency is exchanged equably.
There are certainly issues over how the multi-faceted individual reforms and represents aspects of his/her online selves. The networks archive snapshots of personas, which do change and the management of these progressions is complex. It requires continual disclosure and responsible openness – neither of which is in itself harmful; quite the opposite.
Unexpected and catastrophic use of personal information by government or commerce must surely educate individuals to understand the true value of their personal information, which persona they adopt and how much they give away.
There is a recent and shocking UK legal case in point where a woman who alleged she was raped by a group of men had IM messages she had posted used against her by the defence. According to reports, her credibility was “shot to pieces” with the submission to the court of excerpts from her MSN messages, which showed that she was “prepared to entertain ideas of group sex with strangers”. The judge at Preston Crown Court ordered the jury to return “not guilty” verdicts.
Should the messages – fleeting representations of her changing thoughts and ideas – have been kept private? There is a strong viewpoint made on the F Word about the case. I personally find the court judgement extraordinary and dangerous. Whatever the view, the judgement is a clear lesson on the need to understand the currency of disclosure.
A regular guest on the Liberate Media blog, Lorraine Warren, Director of Postgraduate Education and senior lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the School of Management at the University of Southampton, has blogged on the complexities of privacy, freedom of speech and management of relationships on social networks like Twitter. We’ll be picking up the arguments and discussion on privacy with her and hopefully with Kieron over the next few weeks. There’s a world of ideas to explore - and we’d love to hear your views.
Event: Chinwag Live Xmas futures, Crystal balls
December 3rd, 2008
Last night’s Chinwag event looked ahead to 2013, asking where will we be with digital media, platforms, distribution and user behaviour. If you went hoping for ground-breaking predictions and hot news on emerging innovation you’d have been sorely disappointed - little was said that hasn’t been talked about already.
However, what I found most interesting was discussions around how our hunger for an all-you-can-eat connected world is transforming the way we work, what we think about our privacy, how we build relationships etc. While we (the 30+) are trying our hardest to keep up-to-date and involved, the generation below us are growing up with connectivity being part of their DNA.
“Continuous partial attention“, a term referenced by Chinwag panellist Jamie Coomber, head of digital strategy at Profero, summed up perfectly the environment that those consumed by digital are grappling with on a daily basis. We don’t want to miss anything, and so we’re having to train ourselves to check our Twitter stream, RSS feeds, Facebook updates, wikis etc continually, in a way that isn’t affecting our productivity and concentration.
Our definition of privacy has also shifted - something that I’ve noticed about myself recently. Well-known blogger Neville Hobson who was also on the panel claimed people are becoming more comfortable with sharing personal data, as the benefits of doing so become more enticing. But this trust is misplaced he argued, with the safeguards not yet being in place for us to do this securely.
We are increasingly forging online relationships with like-minded individuals. By 2013 our relationships will be very honed-in, and Jamie Coomber predicted that we’ll have a network for every aspect of our lives and that we’ll adjust our engagement and intimacy from network to network. In addition, Neville Hobson argued we’ll have more choice about who we connect with and when - so for example your collection of ‘friends’ on Facebook will be more clearly segmented based on the area of your life you associate them with.
Open ID was another issue that aroused debate, with the panel agreeing that we’re far from it at present. Connectivity infrastructure, and the prevalence of proprietary systems and applications, emerged as a big trigger of frustration - we want to be able to move from application to application, or network to network, taking one profile with us. While the debate was focused on the future, discussion dwelled on the innovations that have been talked about for the past five years and are technically possible, but are still not happening. Is regulation the only thing that will change this and move us forward?
BT futurologist Jonathan Mitchener made a great summation of the event (not necessarily verbatim): “Innovation brings flexibility, but with it the need to make more decisions about how we work and how we live. We’re not ready to make those decisions yet…”