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Not so long ago I found myself in characteristically pugnacious discussion with a senior human rights figure. The issue was privacy. Her view was that there was an innate and largely unchanging human need for privacy. My view was that privacy was a culturally determined concept. Think of those open multiseated Roman latrines in Pompeii, and imagine having one installed at work. The specific point was whether there was a generational difference in attitudes towards privacy, partly as a consequence of internet social networking. I thought that there was. As a teenager I told my parents absolutely nothing and the world little more. Some girls of that era might be photographed bare-breasted at a rock festival, and some guys might be pictured smoking dope but, on the whole, once we left through the front door, we disappeared from sight.
My children — Generation Y, rather than the Generation X-ers who make most of the current fuss about privacy — seem unworried by their mother’s capacity to track them and their social lives through Facebook. In fact, they seem unworried by anybody’s capacity to see what they’re up to — until, of course, it goes wrong. They seem to want to be in sight, and much effort goes into creating the public identity that they want others to see. Facebook now acts as a vast market place for ideas, preferences, suggestions and actings-out, extending far beyond the capacity of conventional institutions to influence. And the privacy issues it raises have little to do with the conventional obsessions such as CCTV or government data-mining.
At a conference at the weekend I heard that some US colleges have taken to looking at the Facebook sites of applicants before they think to alter them before an interview. This may turn out to be apocryphal, but such a thing certainly could be done. In this era of supplementing exam grades with personal statements and character assessments, what could be more useful than an unguarded record of a student’s true enthusiasms? My daughter’s college friends, she says, are “pretty chilled” about it. There are the odd occasions when a vinous clinch is snapped on a mobile phone and makes the social rounds to the embarrassment of the clinchers, but whatever will be will be.
An EU survey two years ago suggested that this is the pattern more generally. The researchers discovered what seemed to be a paradox: although half of their young respondents were confident in their own ability to protect their online privacy, only a fifth thought it a practical idea to give users in general “more control over their own identity data”. Meanwhile, their elders try to get them concerned about issues such as internet data harvesting by private companies. A US news report last week concerned the work done to create “privacy nudges” — software that reminds users at certain moments that the information they are about to divulge has implications for privacy.
I have to say, as someone who often elects to receive online mailshots from companies operating in areas in which I’m interested, that this seems to me to miss the main problem. As long as you have the right to say “no” to a company’s blandishments, I don’t see a huge problem. That’s why the now notorious Italian bullying video seems much more relevant. At the end of last week three Google employees were sentenced in absentia for breaching the privacy of a handicapped boy, whose horrid treatment at the hands of his Turin schoolmates had been posted on Google Video. This clip spent several months in circulation before being taken down. Almost everyone agrees that the sentence was wrong, perverse and a kick in the teeth for free speech, with implications that could (but won’t) undermine the internet. And they are quite right. But look at it, for a moment, from the point of view of the boy’s parent, or the boy himself. They must have felt powerless and damaged. So how much control or ownership can one have over one’s own image and reputation? The second great question, then, raised with regard to the net is what might be called “reputation management”. What is it that you want people to know about you, and can you have control over it?
Last weekend I was alerted to two new phenomena, both of which caused me to miss a heartbeat. The first was the possibility of using a program, or employing someone, to “suicide” you online. Recently a company in Rotterdam used its Facebook presence to advertise its “web 2.0 suicide machine”, which would act as “a digital Dr Kevorkian [and] delete your online presence” not just on your own sites but on everyone else’s — leaving just a few “last words”. Unfortunately Facebook chucked the suicide machine off its premises, so it then suicided itself, ending with the words “no flowers, no speeches”. As a journalist I was horrified by the implications of online suiciding. In the first place it means the erasure of documentary history. And second it raises the possibility of routine doctoring of material on the internet to render it more palatable to the offended.
The second phenomenon was worse. It was that some people, many perhaps, might seek to undermine any informational authority on the web by flooding it with false information, thus obliquely protecting their own identities. As an occasional target of such misinformation, playfully or maliciously, I know it can play merry hell with everyone’s sense of reality. In other words it seemed to me that there was a threat much worse than that to privacy, and that was of privacy- induced attempts to bend or erase the truth that is essential to the value of the internet. Lack of privacy may be uncomfortable. Lack of truth is fatal.
