The "Post-Private" Society

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July 17, 2008

Neel at Unqualified Offerings says most of us don’t have privacy anymore, so the best remaining option is to make sure The Man doesn’t either:

“Basically, since we can’t take computers away from the government, the only thing I can see is to open those computers up to the public. Take things like FOIA and put it on steroids — the presumption should be that documents are not revealed on request, but that they are made publicly electronically available and searchable by default. Give every cop a camera that runs continuously while they’re on duty, and presume that whoever is suing the police is correct if the police manage to somehow lose the footage.”

I’ve got The Transparent Society on my list of things to re-read, and this argument is (as Jim Henley points out in the comments) a paragraph summary of key ideas found there.

That book also happens to have been written in 1998, three years before you-know-when and at a point where Ruby Ridge and Waco were what people thought about when they thought about government overkill. A lot of the same people who were outraged by those incidents would now argue that everyday citizens shouldn’t be bothering themselves with the internal workings of a Gitmo, and they’re much less amenable to arguments in favor of anything that might cause the average prole to lose his or her stomach for extreme state-sanctioned violence in the name of stopping terror.

I suppose I’m saying that part of why I want to re-read The Transparent Society is because I last read it not long after it came out, and things have changed a lot since then. Arguments against transparency on the part of the state are coming from places they wouldn’t have a decade ago, and they seem to be more sophisticated, to the extent some of the people making them have had to go through serious contortions to maintain whatever ideological label they had before they became fans of a secretive surveillance state that periodically disappears suspected enemies into backwards hellholes where they’ll be tortured.

This was also food for thought:

“Saying that teenagers and twenty-somethings are oblivious to privacy concerns is to misunderstand what they’re doing: they are adapting to reality rather than decrying it. If you live in a fishbowl and curtains are impossible, the only sane response is to stop feeling shame when people stare at you.”

I think a lot of them are oblivious and are not making some rational choice to adapt to changing circumstance. I also suspect we’ve got a few years before a balance is struck, and I think that balance will tilt toward public privacy (meaning you get better control of who can see what that you do online) and against market privacy (meaning social networking sites will do whatever it takes to make providing demographic data palatable to you, as long as you’re still providing it). Handing a marketing firm a few subconscious emotional levers and a bunch of data that allows it to intuit a few more such levers strikes at a more core value buttressed by privacy, which is your ownership of self.

If you put someone in a position to manipulate you, haven’t you ceded a little of that self ownership?

(Link)