What is your definition of privacy?

The general public’s attitude to privacy can appear confused or inconsistent.  Many of us show a great interest in safeguarding our privacy but actual behaviour (for example, using online social networking sites or fetish forums) often reveals a rather cavalier attitude, as people give away and publish intimate details of their lives, such as location, race, education, occupation, which can give away their pseudonym.  These apparent confusions, however, can often be explained away as caused by shifting contexts, ignorance, inappropriate levels of abstraction in presenting a problem to people, and varying attitudes to privacy, in particular between generations.  Let us briefly consider these in turn.

Context

Privacy is not only about what information is around but many other matters connected with the social situation.  Of course we have varying attitudes about who knows what: I might be comfortable with my doctor knowing fact A, my accountant knowing fact B, and my friends knowing fact C, but extremely uncomfortable with anyone knowing the conjunction of these facts.

Context goes further than this.  The method of transmission of information is important.  If I ask my girlfriend what she is doing tomorrow, she will tell me (I hope).  She is comfortable with me having that information.  However, if I did not ask her, and discovered the same information by looking in her diary without permission, she might well be justifiably annoyed.  Additionally, if I sent a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to her mum for the information, relations might become extremely tense, not to say glacial.  Yet it is the same information I receive each time; the relevant difference is the method of acquisition.

Ignorance

In 2010 the websites pleaserobme.com and icanstalku.com achieved notoriety by raising awareness that people were inadvertently sharing information about their whereabouts using Twitter and releasing geotagged information (for instance photographs with the location embedded in the metadata).  Someone who tweeted that they were at a lecture or a concert, therefore, revealed to anyone following their Twitter feed that they were not at home.  Someone who placed a photograph of their own home on a photo-sharing site such as Flickr, and tagged it as such, could reveal where they lived (since the location of the camera, sometimes contained in its metadata, would of course be close to the location of their home).  In other types of case, people would place revealing photographs of themselves and their friends online, and describe aspects of their lives on social networking sites such as Instagram.

People sometimes had very little awareness of the implications of their actions; for instance, it is not widely appreciated that Facebook owns the data on its site, and that its most promising business models are based around the targeted advertising that access to those data makes possible.

Abstraction

Any breach of privacy takes place in a specific context where there are often benefits that can be achieved by sacrificing privacy. For instance, a mobile phone gives one‘s position away as it locates and interacts with the nearest antenna; this is naturally privacy-invasive as it tells the phone network where one is (for example, Apple iPhones and 3G iPads have been storing data about the devices‘ whereabouts in unencrypted form), but the convenience of mobile phones means that people are prepared to discount that worry.  People collect points with store cards, even though it means that supermarkets are able to build up detailed databases of their likes, dislikes and patterns of purchase.  An intimate blog may reveal many details about one‘s personal life, but the gain in self-expression and assertion is usually felt to compensate (interestingly, many explicit bloggers are embarrassed when their friends or family read their writings, but have no problem with total strangers as I have found from chatting with such bloggers).

In the abstract, the issues surrounding location-based privacy, or commerce, or intimate blogging, seem remote and hard to comprehend.  In some (perhaps only a few) particular circumstances, however, one‘s behaviour may lead one into unanticipated, though avoidable, problems.

Attitudes

It is also widely thought that there is a generation gap in attitudes to privacy.  Some believe that younger people have no interest in privacy but this is false.  Rather, there is a difference in interpretation of privacy.

Among older people, a control model predominates (and this is reflected in most privacy law).  The person feels private when he or she is able to control others‘ access to information about him- or herself.

Among younger people, an anonymity model predominates.  The person feels private if freely available information cannot be connected with him or her.  Younger people (digital natives, to use a common term) have become very experienced in negotiating the benefits and pitfalls of sharing information for social ends.  Some have been caught short when they think their anonymous escort profile or ebay account where they sell stolen items cannot be linked back to them but have published an image or home/education location that deanonymises them.

It may be that over-enthusiastic information sharing is unwise and will tend to get out of one‘s control, but even people who have revealed major aspects of their lives online usually have an interest in preserving their privacy to an extent that suits them.

In summary, privacy makes sense only in a particular context.  Without knowing what information may or may not be shared, with whom, for what reason, in what form, and for what potential benefit, privacy is a meaningless abstraction – something, like parenthood or an ice-cream on a hot day, that virtually everyone is in favour of.