1.4: Privacy and Publics
- Page ID
- 210716
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Key points
- Online norms regarding privacy are dynamic and carry significant consequences, particularly in the realm of social media
- The concept of “publics” is explored, emphasizing that online audiences aren’t a singular entity but diverse groups paying sustained attention to specific content.
- Networked publics, formed through social media connections, highlight the role of individuals as bridges connecting different publics.
- Privacy in online publics is complex; the oversimplified dichotomy of private vs. public fails to capture the intricacies of social relationships in digital spaces.
- Evolving nature of online norms and the challenges of defining and protecting privacy in the dynamic landscape of networked publics.
In this chapter
- Section 1: Not “the public” – They’re publics, and they’re networked
- Section 2: Privacy Norms in Online Publics
- Section 3: Civil inattention
- Section 4: Coordinated public attention online
- Section 5: Why privacy is such a tangled issue online
- Section 6: The value of human data
- Mary Louise and Sorority Surveillance — Social Media and Ourselves podcast
- Core Concepts
- Core Questions
- Your sense of privacy evolved over millennia – that puts you at risk today but could improve technology tomorrow
The online world is young, and norms in our networked publics are still being decided. Online norms are also dynamic, which means they are based on a changing set of deciders, including software developers and evolving publics of users. It could be that the most effective forms of privacy protection online will be based on social and cultural norms as we develop these.
But once we figure out what works in the online world in terms of privacy, we will have to articulate it – and then fight for it, because our data is immensely profitable for developers of the platforms we use.
Section 4: Coordinated public attention online
Cancel Culture
A popular topic at the time of this writing is cancel culture or callout culture, a collective attack built upon the practice of using social media to call people out for perceived wrongs. Cancel culture is arguably linked to positive social change, as Spencer Kornhaber asserts in the article linked below from the Atlantic. Yet cancel culture is also linked to devastating losses of employment and identity, and is sometimes directed at people who had little else of value in their lives. Consider the mural by the artist Banksy. A painter stands beside the whimsical phrase “FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS” upon which the red label “CANCELLED” is affixed, serving as a vivid visual representation of Cancel Culture and the real economic and identity-level threats it poses. There is power in shaming, silencing, and censoring.
Partisan North American groups hold divided views on cancel culture, according to 2021 research by Pew. Fortunately, we do not all need to think in polarities or extremes. Cancel culture is not uniformly good or bad. It is an opportunity for all citizens to consider: How should such culture or a better version of it look, and where should it end, if it has value in your society or culture? If you find it is not valuable, then when might it be valuable to use networked publics’ attention to stop people from doing harm online? I offer two well-reasoned perspectives to consider if you aren’t sure: Jon Ronson’s BBC podcast So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which views those called out with empathy; and this CTZNwell Substack on callout culture as accountability.
When publics fixate, attack, troll, and bully
The term cyberbullying received a great deal of attention as the internet reached widespread adoption, and it is entangled moral panics that caused and used it. As parents and educators in the early 2000s struggled to recognize the longstanding issue of bullying in online discourse, they sometimes conflated bullying with all online interaction. Meanwhile, many of the cases the media labeled cyberbullying are not actually bullying, which is a real phenomenon with specific criteria: aggressive behavior, imbalance of power, repeated over time. (These criteria were laid out by Swedish psychologist Dan Owleus; an excellent analysis of cyberbullying in the context of these is in boyd’s fifth chapter of It’s Complicated.)
Still, some online interactions are toxic with cruelty, whether or not we can scientifically see them as bullying. Another term in popular use to describe online attacks is trolling, perhaps derived from the frequent placement of trolls’ comments below the content, like fairytale trolls lurking below bridges.
- Individuals troll. Some seem to lash out individually from personal loneliness or trauma, as with a Twitter troll to whom celebrity Sarah Silverman recently responded with surprising compassion.
- Mobs also troll. A distinctly frightening modern scourge is when critical networked publics and trolls attack in a coordinated effort, or mob. More visible examples of online troll mobs include hateful vitriol directed at a 13-year-old musician’s Youtube explorations, at a black actress in a sequel to a white male film, and at a columnist who is proud to call herself fat – but trolls attack less visible people incessantly as well.
- Not all are affected equally by trolling. While attacks do plague some men online – and specifically men of color – online hatred is directed more often and more viciously at women. Women of color are particularly vulnerable. Many online spaces with widespread usership such as Reddit have cultures of sexism and bigotry – and while there is evidence of efforts to combat toxic online cultures, many of these sites have a long way to go.
Toxicity is technologically exacerbated or worsened, but not technologically determined. John Suler wrote in the early days of the internet about the online disinhibition effect, exploring the psychology behind behaviors that people engage in online but not in person; he noted while some disinhibition is benign, much of it is toxic. More recent research connects online trolling to narcissism. As we perform before online publics, we enter an arena of unleashed and invisible audiences. However, development of theory related to the online disinhibition effect occurred in the 20th century, before most social media, and before participatory culture developed some of the systematic toxicity we see online today.
In the first decades of the 21st century, it has become clear that inequities including racism and gender bias are amplified in online publics, making online spaces much more fraught for attacks upon those identifying as women and those with non-dominant genders and racial identities. This dynamic has deep roots in social history, and is exacerbated by media manipulation, with groups coordinating attacks to maintain dominant cultural norms.
Section 5: Why privacy is such a tangled issue online
Privacy is a notion relating to self-determination that is too complicated to be reduced to one simple idea. Invasion of privacy and its potential consequences can be defined in many ways; this is one of the reasons software companies’ Terms of Service or TOS are never adequate protections for users of their services. How do we demand protection of privacy when it is so multilayered and impossible to define?
Consider these two passages by Daniel Solove in his article, “Why Privacy Matters Even if you have Nothing to Hide.”
Privacy… is too complex a concept to be reduced to a singular essence. It is a plurality of different things that do not share any one element but nevertheless bear a resemblance to one another. For example, privacy can be invaded by the disclosure of your deepest secrets. It might also be invaded if you’re watched by a peeping Tom, even if no secrets are ever revealed.
Privacy, in other words, involves so many things that it is impossible to reduce them all to one simple idea. And we need not do so.
I agree with Solove that privacy is too complicated to be reduced to one simple idea. But often we are still called on to present a simplified definition of our privacy – for example, we have to justify why it is wrong to give companies such rampant uses of our data.
Section 6: The value of human data
We are learning the hard way that we must fight for our privacy online. As an early leader in the social media platform market, Facebook set very poor standards for the protection of user privacy because access to personally identifiable user data was immensely profitable for the company. Before Facebook, it was standard for users of online sites to use avatars and craft usernames that didn’t connect to details of their offline lives.
Still, countless online sites permit or encourage users to create online identities apart from their face-to-face identities. Many of today’s younger internet users choose platforms with higher standards for privacy, limiting the publics that their posts reach and the periods of time that posts last. Youth frequently have “finsta” accounts – “fake” Instagrams that they share with nosy family and acquaintances, while only good friends and in-the-know publics have access to their “real” Instagrams. Practices like these force developers to offer users more control over user privacy and the reach of their posts, at the risk of losing users to competitors.
Users shape platforms and platforms shape user behavior. And social and cultural norms shape both user behavior and software platforms.
Mary Louise and Sorority Surveillance — Social Media and Ourselves podcast
Mary Louise and Sorority Surveillance
Release date: January 1st 2022
“There’s a lot of pressure on sorority girls in particular to perform and to act like a typical sorority girl. But in reality, they’re just being surveyed and watched over at every second.” Gabe Stultz and Prof Daly guide us through stories illustrating the three levels of sorority behavior policing and how they play out on Instagram, Snapchat, and Greek Rank. Produced by Diana Daly and Gabe Stultz, with deep thanks to the students who shared their stories.
LISTEN • LISTEN WITH TRANSCRIPT
Respond to this podcast episode…How did the podcast episode “Mary Louise and Sorority Surveillance” use interviews, student voices, or sounds to demonstrate a current or past social trend phenomenon? If you were making a sequel to this episode, what voices or sounds would you include to help listeners understand more about this trend, and why?
Core Concepts and Questions
Core Concepts
a public
people paying sustained attention to the same thing at the same time
bridge
In the terminology of social network analysis, whenever an individual connects two networked publics (or any two entities, such as two other people), that connector is called a bridge
bullying
a real phenomenon with specific criteria: aggressive behavior, imbalance of power, repeated over time. Defined by Dan Olweus
cancel culture
a collective attack built upon the practice of using social media to call people out for perceived wrongs
civil inattention
Sociologist Erving Goffman’s term for the common understanding that in crowded spaces, you may politely acknowledge others, but you do not get into their business.
cyberbullying
a term entangled in moral panics that caused and used it as parents and educators in the early 2000s struggled to recognize the longstanding issue of bullying in online discourse
dynamic
based on a changing set of deciders, including software developers and the evolving practices of publics of users
networked publics
these are sets of people paying sustained attention to the same thing at the same time that intersect and connect online
online disinhibition effect
the psychological theory that people behave online in ways they would not in person. For more information see Suler, J. (2004). The Online Disinhibition Effect. Cyberpsychology & behavior : the impact of the Internet, multimedia and virtual reality on behavior and society, 7 3, 321-6
privacy
a notion relating to self-determination that is too complicated to be reduced to one simple idea
public by default, private by design and private by default, public by design
the first is a phrase used by danah boyd to emphasize the work required to control the privacy of social media posts – the opposite of face to face communication, which is private by default, public by design. (It’s Complicated, p. 61)
the public
a construct; an idea of “everyone, everywhere” that people imagine, and refer to when they want to add emphasis to the effects of one-to-many speech
Core Questions
A. Questions for qualitative thought:
- Consider at least one recent post you wrote on the last three social media platforms you used. What publics were you intending to reach with those posts? What language use, visual displays, and other strategies did you use to gain the attention of those publics? If you were facing those publics face to face, how might your self-presentation have differed?
- Consider something you have seen online that did not seem to be intended for you in particular to see it. What factors were responsible for its visibility to you? Then consider something you have posted on social media that was seen or commented on by someone you did not have in mind as its audience. How did that situation resolve, and what lessons did you learn from it?
- Imagine you are one of the people in charge of a new online world. Your job is to define the communication norms and policies for everyone invited into that world. Which are the key norms you implement? And how do you present them to people so that they will follow them?
B. Review: Which is the best answer?
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https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/humansrsocialmedia/?p=53#h5p-22
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/humansrsocialmedia/?p=53#h5p-23
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https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/humansrsocialmedia/?p=53#h5p-24
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/humansrsocialmedia/?p=53#h5p-25
C. Game on!
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/humansrsocialmedia/?p=53#h5p-118
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/humansrsocialmedia/?p=53#h5p-308
Related Content
Consider It: Your sense of privacy evolved over millennia – that puts you at risk today but could improve technology tomorrow
Donald Iain Smith/Moment via Getty Images
Laura Brandimarte, University of Arizona and Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University
Many people think of privacy as a modern invention, an anomaly made possible by the rise of urbanization. If that were the case, then acquiescing to the current erosion of privacy might not be particularly alarming.
As calls for Congress to protect privacy increase, it’s important to understand its nature. In a policy brief in Science, we and our colleague Jeff Hancock suggest that understanding the nature of privacy calls for a better understanding of its origins.
Research evidence refutes the notion that privacy is a recent invention. While privacy rights or values may be modern notions, examples of privacy norms and privacy-seeking behaviors abound across cultures throughout human history and across geography.
As privacy researchers who study information systems and behavioral research and public policy, we believe that accounting for the potential evolutionary roots of privacy concerns can help explain why people struggle with privacy today. It may also help inform the development of technologies and policies that can better align the digital world with the human sense of privacy.
The misty origins of privacy
Humans have sought and attempted to manage privacy since the dawn of civilization. People from ancient Greece to ancient China were concerned with the boundaries of public and private life. The male head of the household, or pater familias, in ancient Roman families would have his slaves move their cots to some remote corner of the house when he wanted to spend the evening alone.
Attention to privacy is also found in preindustrial societies. For example, the Mehinacu tribe in South America lived in communal accommodations but built private houses miles away for members to achieve some seclusion.
Cleveland Museum of Art via Wikimedia
Evidence of a drive toward privacy can even be found in the holy texts of ancient monotheistic religions: the Quran’s instructions against spying on one another, the Talmud’s advice not to place windows overlooking neighbors’ windows, and the biblical story of Adam and Eve covering their nakedness after eating the forbidden fruit.
The drive for privacy appears to be simultaneously culturally specific and culturally universal. Norms and behaviors change across peoples and times, but all cultures seem to manifest a drive for it. Scholars in the past century who studied the history of privacy provide an explanation for this: Privacy concerns may have evolutionary roots.
By this account, the need for privacy evolved from physical needs for protection, security and self-interest. The ability to sense the presence of others and choose exposure or seclusion provides an evolutionary advantage: a “sense” of privacy.
Humans’ sense of privacy helps them regulate the boundaries of public and private with efficient, instinctual mastery. You notice when a stranger is walking too close behind you. You typically abandon the topic of conversation when a distant acquaintance approaches while you are engaged in an intimate discussion with a friend.
Privacy blind spots
Scar8840/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA
An evolutionary theory of privacy helps explain the hurdles people face in protecting personal information online, even when they claim to care about privacy. Human senses and the new digital reality are mismatched. Online, our senses fail us. You do not see Facebook tracking your activity in order to profile and influence you. You do not hear law enforcement taking your picture to identify you.
Humans might have evolved to use their senses to alert them to privacy risks, but those same senses put humans at a disadvantage when they try to identify privacy risks in the online world. Online sensory cues are lacking, and worse, dark patterns – malicious website design elements – trick those senses into perceiving a risky situation as safe.
This may explain why privacy notice and consent mechanisms – so popular with tech companies and for a long time among policymakers – fail to address the problem of privacy. They place the burden for understanding privacy risks on consumers, with notices and settings that are often ineffectual or gamed by platforms and tech companies.
These mechanisms fail because people react to privacy invasions viscerally, using their senses more than their cognition.
Protecting privacy in the digital age
An evolutionary account of privacy shows that if society is determined to protect people’s ability to manage the boundaries of public and private in the modern age, privacy protection needs to be embedded in the very fabric of digital systems. When the evolving technology of cars made them so fast that drivers’ reaction times became unreliable tools for avoiding accidents and collisions, policymakers stepped in to drive technological responses such as seat belts and, later, airbags.
[The Conversation’s science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories. Weekly on Wednesdays.]
Ensuring online privacy also requires a coordinated combination of technology and policy interventions. Baseline safeguards of data protection, such as those in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data, can be achieved with the right technologies.
Examples include data analysis techniques that preserve anonymity, such as the ones enabled by differential privacy, privacy enhancing technologies such as user-friendly encrypted email services and anonymous browsing, and personalized intelligent privacy assistants, which learn users’ privacy preferences.
These technologies have the potential to preserve privacy without hurting modern society’s reliance on collecting and analyzing data. And since the incentives of industry players to exploit the data economy are unlikely to disappear, we believe that regulatory interventions that support the development and deployment of these technologies will be necessary.
Laura Brandimarte, Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems, University of Arizona and Alessandro Acquisti, Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
About the author
Dr. Diana Daly of the University of Arizona is the Director of iVoices, a media lab helping students produce media from their narratives on technologies. Prof Daly teaches about qualitative research, social media, and information quality at the University of Arizona.
Media Attributions
- A female gladiator performing for one or more publics in Ancient Rome © Anonyme (IIIe siècle ap J.-C.) is licensed under a Public Domain license
- ivoices_logo_2020
- SD_image-5fd12359ea131 © Sofia Diaz adapted by Emily Gammons is licensed under a CC BY (Attribution) license
- A crowd of people at Katz’s Deli in New York City. © Matt Bidulph is licensed under a CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license
- banksy_follow_your_dreams_cancelled © Chris Devers; Banksy is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives) license
- Data mining © Mathematical Association of America is licensed under a CC BY-ND (Attribution NoDerivatives) license