Hardly a day goes by in our networked world without some new story coming out, somewhere, about “privacy.” Some people don’t like what Google is recording about them; others are angry at Facebook for making public what they had thought was private. Whether the story deals with identity theft or lost databases, browser settings or online advertising, snooping on shoppers or hacking into celebrity cell phones, it goes into the same bucket—and the bucket keeps getting bigger. Like spam, commentary and metacommentary on “privacy issues” as a percentage of Internet traffic must now be well into the double digits.

The booming market for such reporting, and its rapid and increasing penetration into what can now only historically be called “the mainstream media,” hints at what “privacy” really means for the Internet’s intellectual economy. Like pedophiles, cyber-bullies, Nigerian princes, and Russian hackers, corporate “privacy violators” are part of a long and growing succession of vague threats that periodically appear to menace Internet users—with the resulting moral panics serving mainly to justify ham-handed and instantly obsolete attempts at state regulatory intervention. In the past, such panics have almost always been linked by a common thread: the danger of abandoning “authentic” and “real” human contact for the open spaces of the Internet, where everything is somehow all too easy. It is to be expected that culture would find ways of representing such an obviously disruptive technology as a series of phantom threats; each largely unimportant in their substance but vital for creating a concrete, human locus for fear and suspicion of technological change. (As computer technicians constantly complain, users hardly ever implement effective security practices on their computers, but they are quick to blame viruses and hackers whenever a problem appears—a clear sign that we are dealing with a psychological projection rather than a specific problem.)

But privacy is a much bigger issue, and the cast of characters is correspondingly larger. The traditional role of scary non-Anglophone criminal type is filled here by the mysterious “identity thieves,” who probably get much of their menace from the Body Snatchers imagery the label inevitably suggests. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is the mustache-twirling, unscrupulous businessman, an identification continually propped up by new revelations about his past sleaziness (it doesn’t help that he’s a Harvard boy). And then there is, of course, the threat of the totalitarian, omniscient state, from the Chinese with their Great Firewall to the British and their networks of security cameras. In the privacy bucket, this cultural mulligan stew mixes with all kinds of other ingredients, from vaguely remembered tenth-grade readings of Nineteen Eighty-Four to even vaguer memories of the Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut. Combine all of that with the personal associations conjured up by the word “privacy”—your parents reading your diary, being caught masturbating, your sister listening in on your telephone conversations—and the result is a toxic mess capable of engendering hysteria and paranoia in any quantity desired.

Maybe it is because of this that the specific arguments around the privacy issue are so universally confused. Commentators generally like to present themselves as plain old-fashioned folks who believe in the good ol’ values of privacy which kids these days have so irresponsibly abandoned. At that point all coherence ceases; if the commentator even bothers to provide a motive for his opposition to some privacy-destroying cataclysm or other, it is almost always in the form of an undigested innuendo about corporate authoritarianism. In the process, several different types of issues are conflated into one problem: data protection, which is above all a matter of security policy; data collection and indexing, which raises problems of centralization; and data privacy, strictly speaking.

The first is so technical that functional solutions are almost never offered in commentary. In fact, awareness of the issue seems to emerge at all only when someone loses a laptop or when identity theft becomes the hot-button issue of the week. With respect to data collection, however—and here the culprit, most of the time, is Google—the situation is radically different. It often suffices to simply accuse someone of collecting information (search data, shopping patterns, demographics) for all the toxic bubbles of suspicion to float to the surface. Surely you’re not in the business of making money off of information? Why would you need so much information anyway? And can you really not tell if it’s me buying the Hello Kitty vibrators?

This last genre of query is especially significant, if only because it recurs so often. Google and the other usual suspects, when faced with such questions, immediately hasten to assure doubters that their information is strictly anonymous. They are rarely believed. The rhetorical strategy of the corporations is thus always to differentiate data collection from issues of privacy, while that of their critics is the opposite. From the point of view of Google, this only makes sense: if your goal is to collect and analyze information en masse, then the identities of individuals (not to mention their names and Social Security numbers) are of tertiary interest at best. The end of the Google horizon is not the Orwellian nightmare of complete dossiers, available at the touch of a button, on any person in the world; it is rather the old social-scientific dream of universal quantification, prediction, and generalization.

But if the objectives of Google diverge so widely from what privacy crusaders think they are, why does the debate keep returning to the same familiar set of rails? What leads critics to evoke, so strenuously, the specter of Orwell’s telescreens? This is a question than can be answered only from the perspective of the privacy debate’s third aspect: Facebook, or the publicization of previously private data. On the surface, this controversy, which is perhaps the loudest and most visible, is also the least comprehensible. People who have deliberately given their data—their “likes” and “statuses,” their photos and self-descriptions—to somebody else, according to the norms of pre-Internet communication, cannot expect to have much control over it in the future. Enough old proverbs (for instance, “three can keep a secret if two of them are dead”) testify to this that demanding the contrary seems absurd.

And yet, of course, to an increasing number of people it is not absurd. Unlike Internet communication, pre-Internet communication presupposed the existence of separate, variably permeable spheres, which could be maintained with little effort and fantasized about with even less. (There’s an old Eudora Welty story about a man who leads a double life, with one life ultimately as restrictive and conventional as the other. Historically, I’d venture to say, this has been closer to reality than the utopia of closets evoked by some privacy activists.) For the privacy activist, unease with Facebook is usually founded on something much more mundane than Nineteen Eighty-Four: quite simply, the increasing difficulty of telling the little white lies that help most of us keep our spheres apart.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, the proposed solution in the privacy debate has not been to bow to historical inevitability and join in a mass experiment to remake our idea of the boundaries of social experience. Instead, the suggestion that permanent and omnipresent Internet access will in fact remake these boundaries whether we like it or not has been treated as seedy and disreputable, something like a trendy contrarianism possibly spread via dirty corporate dollars. The virtually universal resistance among privacy advocates to such a line of argument—which, corporate-funded or not, would at least recognize the Internet as a space of potentialities rather than simply of threats—has strongly narrowed their rhetorical field.

Indeed, apparently the only option left to them has been to circle the wagons in defense of positions they must constantly construct as traditional: suspicion of most forms of digitization, pressure to regulate or curtail electronic data-collection, and a legalistic paranoia about the privacy policies of key corporate actors. (Although such standpoints are, in fact, frequently represented as traditional or traditionalistic, the only “tradition” they really fit into is one of free-floating psychological conservatism.) Out of these and other fragments of value-discourses there is gradually emerging a kind of electronic Jeffersonianism, which is resistant to corporatization and commercialization, focused on the opposition between the individual user and the institutions that govern her Internet experience, and, paradoxically, inclined to privilege “low-tech” interactions (email) over “high-tech” ones (Twitter). (On the more technical side, this often translates into free-software advocacy and an interest in developing reliable and widespread encryption and data-protection techniques.)

Internet Jeffersonianism might appear to be a satisfying and compelling position, especially for people who, for whatever reason, are uncomfortable with the rabid capitalism of the Internet world. It is still, nevertheless, in large part a product of the bucket, a barely coherent and technically fuzzy result of fear, prejudice, suspicion, and insecurity. (The ideological climate in which it has developed has been such that any better result would have been unthinkable.) And there is also a more specific reason to mistrust it—for its central concept, in defense of which every privacy advocate rallies, cannot serve as a moral anchor at all.

This concept is, of course, “personal information.” What does “personal information” include? Phone numbers; Social Security numbers; addresses; bank account numbers; credit card numbers; biographical details; places of employment. The more specific and precise—the more quantified—a piece of information is, the more valuable it is for privacy advocates. Hardly anyone is up in arms about Google indexing childhood memories shared on Internet forums or Facebook making profile pictures public. Because these bits of information are hazy, indefinite, useful only for the most suave and intellectual of identity thieves, they receive little attention. The credit card number and the Social Security number, in contrast, have become the waving banner and the supreme stake in any true privacy debate.

They are also the symbols of another process, one of the gradual unfolding and expansion of institutionalization centered on information processing, quantification, and database-building. The Social Security number—which was introduced with the Social Security Act along with the solemn promise that it would not be used as a unique personal identifier—is the central driving force behind that process on the government side, and with the growing information-density of digital data it will likely soon be joined by biometric and other descriptors. The credit card number is the corporate analogue, and it is no accident that the in-depth transaction analysis it allows is one of the central issues of this side of the privacy controversy.

In short, the Internet Jeffersonians cannot stand athwart history yelling “Stop!”, because what they are defending from corporate and government interference is a central element of the very processes of institutionalization and commercialization they so fiercely oppose. The contemporary sense of “privacy” itself—the security and sanctity of the Internet-connected individual—could only have come about because technologies and practices like Social Security numbers made the individual institutionally legible in the first place. This is why the new Jeffersonian rhetoric so frequently rings hollow: it can never quite admit that its own ideology presupposes a much more radical “traditionalism” than is allowable.

Is there a better alternative, a theory and program for the Internet that could understand Google and Facebook without making the Jeffersonian mistake? There will, I think, be one soon. It is true that the Internet has largely outgrown the euphoria and utopianism of its early years, and as a space with some putatively inherent subversive potential it leaves more and more to be desired. At the same time, American culture and society—no matter how strange it seems to say so—have lagged behind the Internet’s development. Only within another generation or so will we see how corrosive or creatively destructive the Internet’s effects on human relationships will really be, and only then will we be able to make sense of the whole business. In the meantime, Google and Facebook, while not an especially palatable avant-garde, are the only real one that we have.

The Poverty of Privacy: Google, Facebook, and the New Jeffersonians

Share on Tumblr