Privacy 2 Standards

I’m going to the Battle of Ideas conference later this month. I do recommend that (London-and-environs-based) readers take a look. Despite it being at the weekend, which might understandably dampen the ardour of any self-respecting new media flâneur, it’s looking like a veritable cavalcade of fresh ideas, innovation and debate across the disciplines. Not just technology and media, but art, education, health, science, everything… I am going on Saturday (gulp!) and Sunday (argghhh!) and that says a lot about how valuable I think it could be. It’s also really cheap when you look at the range and calibre of the speakers. Yay for the Institute of Ideas for putting it on.

One particular aspect that’s interesting to me [there is a work aspect to that in terms of how NMK may be participating, but that participation comes out of my own perception of what's interesting in New Media right now] is the debate on Saturday afternoon on privacy in this new world of Web 2.0 and the strange psychology that has developed around that.

On the one hand, we’re telling perfect strangers what we had for lunch and where we are on Twitter, give our name and address and phone numbers to Facebook, divulge our deepest personal secrets on blogs (but not this blog, dear reader, rest-assured), publish photos and videos of our social life. Transparency is held as an ideal. Self-surveillance, continual publishing and, above all, authenticity, are held as golden standards.

On the other hand, people are often appalled at the thought of Tesco’s (the biggest UK supermarket chain) analysing our shopping habits, Facebook personalising advertising for us, Google recording our searches and our ISPs and credit card companies selling our browsing and buying patterns to third parties. Within larger organisations, corporate IT departments are appalled by the risks we’re taking, but we hold our hands to our ears and say ‘lalala – open that firewall, you nazis’.

So are we being two-faced? Do we want our cake and to eat it too? It’s OK to hold up transparency as an ideal for businesses and corporations and to operate according to that ideal ourselves, but when those organisations take some very obvious steps in data-mining the information that’s available, then it’s suddenly a different story?

The plan, at the moment, is to unveil some new research on attitudes to privacy and to unpick the nature of these inconsistencies at the conference.

Without the benefit of any evidence whatsoever, though, here’s a couple of hopefully inflammatory thoughts:

• Transparency online is held as a gold standard of behaviour because it’s viewed as a return to past, lost, possibly illusory norms where people dealt with each other face-to-face and where a firm handshake was all you needed to create genuine trust and a reliable relationship. Our virtual existence craves some solidity where it is lacking.
• That the transparency lobby is thus a mechanism of nostalgia. They’re Golden Ageists. That’s fine, but it’s a narrative about commercial practices that potentially shifts the visibility of what is happening to the data you’re sharing. I’m putting on my post-modernist hat, and suggesting that narratives are the way we understand the world. But one of the counter-narratives might be equally valid, one about big business set to exploit consumers at every opportunity.
• Holding those two (and more) possible narratives in our heads at the same time is far from impossible. We live in a world of warring narratives, each of which interpolate us at some times.
• That the Cluetrain has already been railroaded by those bastards in big business who can see how to manipulate this state of affairs.

I personally like the idea and practice of being transparent online about my behaviour, the things I like and don’t like, and how I’m feeling. It’s liberating to not operate under a corporate persona, or maintain a series of separate online identities. If that allows advertisers to target me better (I like really expensive, funky, creative adverts for cheap stuff, btw) then that probably won’t do me much harm. Does it harm ‘people in general’ to be transparent? That’s a harder question and automatically makes me sound either incredibly patronising or self-deluded if I say ‘yes’.

But ‘yes’, I think it does. The companies that have the most money and thus the most advanced data-mining techniques might ultimately be the most successful. They’ll target us better, harder, faster, more creatively and more often. Because we’ve opened up. That’s bad news. Commercial success would be a meritocracy in an ideal world, I think: the best companies would be most successful. Transparency is often cited as a way of making that happen – the best companies will expose their internal workings and personality, and thus win support – but it is also a way of making it fail – the consumer population becomes infinitely ‘bucketable’, targetable, individually identifiable by the corporations with the best, most-expensive technology and resources.

Possibly related:

• Facebook on Privacy: ‘We’re Finished’
• Now We Are 2.0
• Children