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Privacy

Ok hi. This is Chip and Barb and Nick and weíre going to talk about privacy issues. Iím going to start by making two or three points then Chip and Barb will talk and then Iíll probably come back and say some more. As with the other topic we recorded today free speech and privacy, I want to highlight some of the ways in which we talk about and think about these issues. And to try to shake those up a little bit from the conventional ways that we discuss them. And let me start with this one. Do people want privacy? We all say we want it, we all assume people want it, but I want to question that assumption. Whether people in fact really do want privacy and what they mean when they say they want privacy. Because for most people with maybe very very few exceptions, they in fact do want parts of their lives to be accessible to other people and we live our lives in such a way that we make them accessible to other people. Starting with an extremely small sphere of our family, our loved ones, our partners, our friends, our neighborhoods, our extended families, our churches, the places where we work and then gradually through enlarging concentric circles of who we want/and let me repeat that. Who we want to have access to our activities, our thoughts, our feelings, our habits, the things that we do, the things we spend money on, our needs, our problems, our issues, etc. In fact those concentric circles donít divide into a private sphere versus a public sphere. Rather there are a series of enlarged circles, some of which are relatively small in number. Some of which are relatively large in number. But within each of those circles we want to share these things. Itís actually very very few things that we go into the bathroom and lock the door or lock ourselves in a closet or whatever it is that we do. Well we really donít want anybody even our closest friends and loved ones to know about what we do. No, we donít want privacy. We want to share these things about ourselves. We want to decide with whom we share them, but we do want to share them. And so this issue it seems/already Iím trying to sort of shake things up, but itís not just a question about protecting this zone of privacy, a zone which I think/well if it ever existed, it certainly doesnít exist any more. And to talk instead about the issue of who decides who we share these things with and who we donít. Thatís a different issue. Then the notion of privacy per se. And let me pause and then Iíll come back for a couple more points.

When I was thinking about privacy I remembered a book I read many years ago called something like "Ecological Psychology" and it was an approach to studying human behavior that would be less intrusive than doing a survey or observing people or interviewing them or some of the obvious ways that people study things. And this book was fascinating because they had many different examples of ways to make sense of human behavior without confronting the person or even letís say letting the person know that they were being observed. For example, you could look at how worn a foot path was to get some idea of how many people went down the path. You could have an auto repair shop keep track of what station people had turned their car radio to as a way of getting an idea of who the viewers or I mean who the listeners of that radio station were. One of the most interesting examples I heard of was a museum that wanted to know what was the average age of people who viewed various exhibits and what they did was look at nose prints on the glass display case. So if the nose prints were three feet high, they had an idea that this was very young people and four feet, little bit older and so on. I thought that book was very clever. Of course it also has the potential downside of the idea that we donít ever fully have privacy. Another thing along these lines that I think is worth thinking about is the effects of new technologies and here Iím thinking beyond the internet, beyond the web, the whole array of new technologies that allow us to understand more about whatís going on in the world. Things that we never dreamed possible. For example, archeologists are now able to look at mummies without unwrapping them, but use magnetic resonance imaging, CAT scans, and other techniques and look inside the mummy case and have been able to make pretty reasonable assumptions about things like how old the person was, what sex they were, how they died, what kind of food they ate, what kind of general health they were in, even what areas they lived in based on certain minerals in their bones and so on. Recently I read about something going back 800,000 years to a cave in France where people have discovered some modern humans and have now made all kind of inferences that they were killed by Neanderthals and various other things. All based on a whole host of new technologies that allow us to look more closely at even people who were long dead/when you talk about living people the possibilities are much greater and now of course itís possible to do DNA typing, to/with just the smallest few cells to be able to figure out who a person is, where they were, and so on. All of these new technologies I think/one of the things they point out is that whatever we think about privacy, whether we view it as a good or a bad, whether we want to/whether we view that we have such a zone as Nick was talking about and want to protect that zone. That the boundaries are shifting. Theyíre shifting in part because we think differently about things. But theyíre also shifting because the tools we have for expressing ourselves and for learning about other people are constantly changing.

Ok, letís again add another step to this discussion. I asked earlier whether people really want privacy, or what they mean, or what they think they mean when they say they do want it. And a (I,NU) different way of looking at this is that we exchange our privacy for certain kinds of benefits or perceived benefits. Certainly as a society, if not as individuals, weíve made a variety of bargains that for the sake of certain kinds of conveniences, certain kinds of protections, certain kinds of real or perceived benefits, as I said before, weíve given up large scales of what was once considered to be our privacy. Private information about us, private activities, private spaces that we reside in. And I think there are a couple of things to ask about this question. One is whoís the "we" who decided? How was that decision made? Who made it? Was it a conscious decision or was it just a series of little decisions or little choices that over time had aggregated effects that eroded I would say any meaningful sense of privacy in large areas of our lives. But nobody ever asked our permission or asked our active complicity. It just sort of happened. Or, we were asked if we wanted X and we said oh yes indeed we do. And nobody pointed out that when you got X you are also going to get Y and Y was you know certain effects that over time eroded privacy. If you read my paper on this, if youíve read/looked at Bill Bigelowís book which I think is a great book on this topic, he notes the irony that in fact the very mechanisms that weíve created, established to create problems of privacy like gathering information off of credit cards, that we now sort of think that those same mechanisms are now going to help to solve the problem of privacy through technological fire walls or passwords that protect certain things or encrypting information so that it canít be authorized by unauthorized people. But I think you can already see where some of the issues are there. One is the issue isnít the encryption, the issues are how we decide things like authorized versus unauthorized. Who does this define those categories? Are insurance companies entitled to certain kinds of information about you? Why? Are employers entitled to certain kinds of information about you? Why? Whoís making those decisions? Those arenít technological decisions. Thereís also the issue that had been mentioned by a couple of the groups in the class already that even technological fixes like encryptions and fire walls and passwords donít always do a very good job of protecting these things. But what I want to do is problemitize this idea of protecting and ask questions like well protecting from who? Sure, protecting from unauthorized people, but when are the situations in which we need to be protected from the authorized people? Do we ever think that way? Well often we donít. We assume that authorized people are only going to use things in appropriate ways. But once the information is gathered, the problem already exists. Itís not a question/well let me just stop and pause at that point.

I just wanted to pick up on one of Nickís first point, the idea that we donít want privacy to a certain degree and I can see that really coming true when I think about movie stars and what happens to people who have fame, either academic professors or whatever. It seems like we all want to be in some sense recognized for what we do. And so we enjoy a certain amount of notoriety and people knowing what we do and that we do it well. But it turns into a problem though when things get misrepresented when weíre not/our representations are out of our control and other people are using information for purposes that we donít have any control over either. So it seems like then it becomes not so much a privacy issue but other issues involving what/how the information is actually used and for what purposes.

Nick mentioned a couple of ironies and I want to just point out another irony that/about privacy which is that as itís possible/as it becomes possible to get more and more information about people, and as that information becomes more and more widely available, thereís a little bit of a who-cares phenomenon. As it becomes very easy to learn all kinds of information, we may approach a situation where there is so much available that the dangers or the perceived dangers of losing privacy may be much less severe than they were in situations where it wasnít so easy to get such information. Iím thinking of the possibly idealized small town of 100 years ago where people may not have known certain things that are easier to find today through sources such as the web. And yet because itís so easy to get certain kinds of information, it may be have less salience or less meaning for many people in terms of invasions of privacy.

Let me close my part of this by just really going directly at this issue of our notions of public and private spaces itself and that distinction. I gave an earlier argument about this when I talked about these concentric circles that itís not two different zones but a realm of different sort of degrees of proximity. And thereís a lot to say about the issues of public and private spaces but as the philosopher Hannah Arendt points out our notions of public and private or somewhat shaped by spatial metaphors, physical locations, at a time when people/at least people who if they had enough money could live in houses that had high walls around them, there was an idea of a space that was a domestic space. It was in some sense physically set off and shielded from an external world and there were literally public spaces, the agora and other places where people would go to meet to talk, to debate, to make deals, and other things. So in the Greek context these actually were physical spaces that constituted peopleís notions of whatís private and whatís public. I think people have made a lot of interesting comments about the ways in which the internet is a new public space and I mean thereís a lot to talk about there. But I wanted to just make a couple of points about this distinction of public and private spaces. One is obviously that does this distinction only really made sense for people who already have certain kinds of privileges and benefits. If you lived in an apartment with three other families or in an apartment in a big building with very thin walls, you knew when the people next door were having an argument. You knew how many liquor bottles people put in their trash containers in the morning, etc. because these were things that in fact werenít private at all. They werenít protected by big high walls or large estates the people could literally hide behind and keep safe from external view. So even this notion of privacy only pertains to people who already have certain kinds of material and other privileges. But thereís also the sense in which even what we think of as our private space is increasingly, well one word would be colonized or invaded by public influences. The media that we have TV, home video now, certainly computers, are always two-way. If you remember the novel in 1984, one of the things that Orwell talked about there was how the TV screens on the wall were actually always two-way video. That the same screen that brought information to you or images to you from other places also was recording information from you.

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... (I,NU) twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But even in (I,NU) an awful lot of sociology and psychology majors now are being hired by commercial (I,NU) to do (I,NU) and (I,NU) on consumer characteristics. Certainly many political parties are trying to get very very sophisticated models of the (I,NU) of all sorts of demographic groups. Sometimes (I,NU) is done directly when people ask you personally for information. Sometimes itís done indirectly through things like your purchases on your credit cards or other sorts of information may or may not (I,NU) being gathered or may or may not (I,NU) used in these ways. But whatís happening through this industry and it is a very important and powerful industry of (I,NU) and (I,NU) is remarkably accurate representation (I,NU) are being developed that predict your consumer tastes, your political preferences, your private activities even when youíre "home alone". You know, there are people who know or who can state with pretty high accuracy what television shows you watch. Are they actually monitoring your TV? No, they just know. They know through/as I said remarkably accurate and sophisticated modeling programs. Now do you consider that an invasion of your privacy? Nobodyís actually looking at you personally. But they use that information in all sorts of ways that do effect you personally, including from the choice of products to the choice of political candidates you have to make decisions from. A very specific example about this/weíve talked a lot about cookies and cookies on the internet. But one way in which these things are increasingly being used is the phrase is usually I think allowing sites to be tailored to serve you better, that if media sites or new sites or commercial sites do gather information about you, your preferences, your purchases, your tastes, that allows them to customize their content for you. Like for example a new sites that says well weíre checking what kinds of new stories youíre reading and weíre going to send you more new stories on those topics because thatís what youíve said youíre interested in. Well, yeah we see that in one sense as a form of serving us better but I think whatís interesting to see is that the dynamic between what shapes our preferences, what influences and changes our preferences and what responds to or serves those preferences is a loop. A loop in which the changes in one change and reinforce the other. And in that sense those things change us. They change us directly and they change us indirectly. And these procedures of marketing, profiling, polling, sampling, gathering information both directly and indirectly about you is a very sophisticated process by which thatís working. And of course the bottom line here is you donít even know whatís happening. But it does have effects. Let me pause at that point.

Iíd just like to throw out a question/Iíd be interested in anyoneís thoughts on this. It seems to me when we talk about all these marketing surveys and the way amazon.com builds a profile of the books you like to read and so on, that for me thereís a little bit of a separation that what I feel often is not that theyíre getting a deeper and truer picture of me, but that theyíre constructing this alter-ego, this avatar, this other thing which is not me. It has some similarity to me. But I find it actually just sort of curious. I donít feel invaded by it at all. So for example we get tons of mail-order catalogs at home and except for the feeling for all the trees that have been destroyed it doesnít really bother me too much that thereís an obvious pattern of who our family is reflected by the particular catalogs that we get. Sometimes Iím surprised that weíll get someone that I didnít expect, but itís just sort of mildly amusing to see what that image is and in some ways the more developed that image becomes, the more it actually feels easier to separate myself from it. That I can see myself as a citizen in the society/a person who buys things and all of that. But thereís this sort of curious alter-ego thatís being constructed by the people who want to sell things and doesnít in the end actually feel like an invasion of privacy.

Well I have a slightly different view of it. I am troubled by it and Iím troubled by it for two reasons. One is the things like the amazon.com profiles are relatively crude and they donít come anywhere close to really accurately representing us. But the thing to remember is first of all that there isnít just one of these but many of these avatars, many of these representations/some of them much more sophisticated based on much more accurate and complete profiling behavior. And the other is of course that there are many of them and maybe any one of them isnít ourselves but if we looked at the overlapping of 15 or 20 or 100 of them being profiled by different people/our books, our tastes, our food, our health, our insurance characteristics, etc., all of a sudden the overlapping of all those avatars maybe does start to look quite a bit like us. The other problem I have, or other concern I have about it is the way in which/not the way in which the avatar becomes more and more like us, but the ways in which we become more and more like the avatar. Because thereís a manipulative element in this as well. When amazon.com/just to take that example starts only sending me profiles about books that fit their/(I,NU) that fit their profile, but what I would like, I probably am more likely to buy those books or at least some of those books. And in that way I become even more like their profile predicts I will be. So I see these as much more interactive and in that sense much more manipulative than simply/and as I said their relatively crude attempt to model one part of my consumer tastes. That part of it I think isnít very threatening at all. But I think systemically something else that is I think much more invasive is actually going on.

Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think what one of the things I see going on here is that weíve defined an issue as privacy, I mean thatís what we called it in the course. We said thereís this privacy issue. But it seems to me like we canít really get very far by just talking about privacy. We have to think about it relationally. Privacy in relation to what? And a number of the examples weíve used today have been privacy in relation to certain purposes. I may have a purpose that I want my doctor to know things about me because I think Iíll get better medical treatment if the doctor knows those. I may not want someone else to know those same details because I have a different purpose there. Nickís example about the concentric circles of privacy very much relates to this. In my inner-most zone I may want to share lots of things because Iím very close to people and I want them to know things because it will strengthen our relationship and we help each other. As we go further out in those concentric circles, the purposes become narrower and more specialized so that the person who helps/who repairs my car I want them to know a lot about the car and my interest in what the car should/how the car should work. But I donít particularly want them to know all kinds of other things. So I think the/for me what this says is that privacy can at one level be characterized in terms of information and who has access to it. But to go further with the discussion, we have to talk about what are the purposes of both the original possessor of that information and the new possessor of that information and how do those purposes relate to the degree of information thatís being shared.

I just wanted to say one more thing about the sort of ever-expanding areas and places that we normally look for in terms of privacy, like you know not letting our social security numbers out/I mean things like that we normally think about when we think of privacy. Thereís a whole sort of set of other things which we donít normally think about like I think/Iím thinking of for instance garbage has now become a hot topic. And it seems as if people are/well people who are maybe undergoing some law process or something now that theyíre looking into the idea of looking through peopleís garbage and itís becoming a legal problem too. So itís just interesting to see all the different areas of your life that can possibly be thought about in this way, that we might not normally think about.

Yeah I think itís interesting to think about even something like garbage which we donít normally think about very much that bears on this whole topic. Weíve talked a lot today on/I think weíre going to wrap this up. We hope to be adding the other three audio lectures fairly soon. So appreciate your listening and weíll talk to you later.