Sociologist danah boyd has posted her responses to a Wall Street Journal debate on privacy that included Stewart Baker, Jeff Jarvis, and Chris Soghoian. Boyd's responses are nuanced, evidence-based, and humane, and get well past the "privacy is dead" and "kids don't care about privacy, or they wouldn't be using Facebook" simplifications. As ever, she is required reading for anyone who wants to know what's going on beyond the superficial debate.
People should – and do – care deeply about privacy. But privacy is not simply the control of information. Rather, privacy is the ability to assert control over a social situation. This requires that people have agency in their environment and that they are able to understand any given social situation so as to adjust how they present themselves and determine what information they share. Privacy violations occur when people have their agency undermined or lack relevant information in a social setting that’s needed to act or adjust accordingly. Privacy is not protected by complex privacy settings that create what Alessandro Acquisti calls “the illusion of control.” Rather, it’s protected when people are able to fully understand the social environment in which they are operating and have the protections necessary to maintain agency…
I think that positioning privacy and public-ness in opposition is a false dichotomy. People want privacy *and* they want to be able to participate in public. This is why I think it’s important to emphasize that privacy is not about controlling information, but about having agency and the ability to control a social situation. People want to share and they gain a lot from sharing. But that’s different than saying that people want to be exposed by others. Agency matters.
From my perspective, protecting privacy is about making certain that people have the agency they need to make informed decisions about how they engage in public. I do not think that we’ve done enough here. That said, I am opposed to approaches that protect people by disempowering them or by taking away their agency. I want to see approaches that force powerful entities to be transparent about their data practices. And I want to see approaches the put restrictions on how data can be used to harm people. For example, people should have the ability to share their medical experiences without being afraid of losing their health insurance. The answer is not to silence consumers from sharing their experiences, but rather to limit what insurers can do with information that they can access.
Debating Privacy in a Networked World for the WSJ
