“No matter how many times a straight white male tells you privacy is dead, it is not true,” said Danah Boyd, the keynote speaker for the official opening of SxSW. Boyd is a social media researcher who now works at Microsoft Research New England. She travels the US, speaking to children and parents about their expectations, fears and experiences of privacy online.
The Austin Convention Centre. Half of it, at least.
Some of the stories are quite scary. When Facebook popped up a window asking whether users wanted to make their previously private content public, it offered public as the default. Result, one little girl, who with her mother’s help had carefully protected her account to hide her whereabouts from her abusive father, clicked through without grasping the consequences, and suddenly her privacy was gone.
Google made a similar mistake, in launching Buzz, although Heather Ford pointed out after the talk that Boyd missed the most egregious consequence of Google’s error. It wasn’t that people believed their email content had been exposed, but that contact information and connections they had a reasonable expectation to have kept private, were exposed.
As Duncan McLeod, a technology editor in South Africa, noted: he has the emails and phone numbers of cabinet ministers and company CEOs stored on Google. Those are not for public consumption. Neither, for that matter, is contact information for your sister’s hot friend who doesn’t want anything to do with you.
Google is guilty of another, less mentioned transgression. The “live typing” in Google Wave, which lets your interlocutors see what you type as you type it, is equally invasive. I know I rely on the ability to delete text when I think twice about writing something. It’s a level of privacy I am not willing to give up.
Boyd is right, however, in pointing out that these blunders not only damaged the trust users had in Google, but that they weren’t technology problems. They were human mistakes. She flashed an eloquent response from an irate user onto the screen: “F*ck you Google.”
The first mistake, she said, was to integrate a very public service, social networking, into what had been a very private medium, email. The second was more serious. Google (and Facebook) required users to opt-out, instead of asking them to opt-in. Any user who unthinkingly clicks on the “next” button, thinking they can trust the site they’re on, is going to feel angry and betrayed by this. Even given the benefit of the doubt — that Google wasn’t deliberately trying to boost numbers — the presumption of opt-out invites disaster.
It also ignores key social rituals. We make small talk not because we really care about the weather, but because it established a mutual bond that initiates conversation. It’s not efficient, but it is necessary.
Boyd cites an interesting example from chat rooms. Users often call out “A/S/L”, asking others to reveal age, sex and location. Some chat rooms then lifted that information out into a profile, which seemed more efficient. However, it removed an opportunity to engage in conversation. When someone tells you where they’re from, Boyd said, it’s okay to rejoin with small talk. By offering that information, people make themselves vulnerable, which is a key ritual in establishing a bond of trust. When someone merely uses stranger’s profile to engage them in conversation, that bond has not been established. Then it’s just plain creepy.
Privacy is a complex beast, because it is not binary. Making information public is not the same as publicising it. She says making public information more public is a violation of someone’s privacy. It could be doing someone a service, but it could also be dangerous, and even deadly.
Conversely, it’s not about how much is public. Some celebrities (like Angelina Jolie) and many bloggers, feel that their privacy is protected by putting a lot out in the public domain. This allows them to satisfy the public interest in their lives, thoughts or work, while retaining a private space for themselves.
Privacy poses many a conundrum. While in the real world, information is private by default, and public only through effort, the opposite is true online. And while you can whisper an aside in the real world to maintain privacy, a teen cannot easily publish a journal without it being visible to parents, teachers and other people with power over them.
The issue is not whether or not information is public, but how public it is.
Another challenge faces people whose public roles require a certain discretion. While a teacher, in the real world, can adopt a teacherly demeanour when they encounter a student, but be more free in other circumstances, you cannot make that distinction online. Therefore, online, teachers always have to be teachers. It’s no surprise that some people are simply not comfortable living online, exposed, and therefore restrained in ways they would not have been in the physical world. And it’s not about having something to hide. Take our hypothetical teacher: there’s nothing wrong with drinking alcohol, or talking about religion, politics or sex, in the right environment. This is forbidden to them online, 100% of the time, however.
Boyd is, consequently, very sympathetic to the problems faced by individuals who fear the privacy implications of the internet, or distrust the actions — often merely well-intended but mistaken — of companies such as Google or Twitter or Facebook.
The fact is, she said, we will have more private/public mashups in future. Very little will be totally private or totally public, but there is also no formula for understanding them, and assessing how they’re being transformed by technology.
Privacy, and the expectation of privacy, changes with context, with age, with social group, and even over time. It is an evolving process, which is why it is important to engage users. Ask them, before making a change. Don’t rely on the ability to roll back when you’ve gone too far as a company. Because sometimes you simply can’t.
This brings her to the core issue: privacy is about control. If users feel they have no control over their identity and information online, they will feel violated.
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