Blogger: Bob Blakley
Andrea DiMaio of Gartner recently posted a blog entry entitled "Forget Privacy: It Is Just An Illusion".
DiMaio's lament rephrases Scott McNealy's famous quote ("You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.")
McNealy was wrong then and DiMaio is wrong now; they're both dead wrong, and it's important.
Here's DiMaio's key sentence:
I have come to realize that, does not matter how careful we are, we are going to lose control of our privacy.
But Andrea DiMaio never had control of his privacy. And nothing - including technology - was ever going to give him control. DiMaio and McNealy assume without saying it that privacy means "keeping personal information secret". And by that definition privacy is an illusion. But "keeping personal information secret" is the wrong definition of privacy. As long as your personal information is secret, you don't even have a privacy problem. It's only when somebody else knows your personal information that you have a privacy problem.
Privacy is the problem you have after you share sensitive information.
When you discover that you might have a socially awkward medical condition and you go to the doctor, you don't keep the condition secret from him - you tell him about it so that you can get treated. And when you leave the office, you don't control your doctor; you trust him with your secret. You trust him with your private information because he has taken an oath to behave sociably and to use your personal information only in ways which benefit you.
That's how privacy works; it's not about secrecy, and it's not about control: it's about sociability. Privacy is a social good which we give to one another, not a social order in which we control one another.
Technologists hate this; social phenomena aren't deterministic and programmers can't write code to make them come out right. When technologists are faced with a social problem, they often respond by redefining the problem as a technical problem they think they can solve.
In rhetoric, we call this redefinition of the problem "framing".
The privacy framing that's going on in the technology industry today is this:
Social Frame: Privacy is a social problem; the solution is to ensure that people use sensitive personal information only in ways that are beneficial to the subject of the information.
BUT as technologists we can't (as DiMaio observes) control peoples' behavior, so we can't solve this problem. So instead let's work on a problem that sounds similar:
Technology Frame: Privacy is a technology problem; since we can't make people use sensitive personal information sociably, the solution is to ensure that people never see others' sensitive personal information.
We technologists have tried to solve the privacy problem in this technology frame for about a decade now, and, not surprisingly (information wants to be free!) we have failed. DiMaio now wants to give up. But he's forgotten the reframing; he's assuming that the technology frame is the problem, and therefore if the problem can't be solved in the technology frame it can't be solved.
The technology frame isn't the problem. Privacy is the problem. Society can and routinely does solve the privacy problem in the social frame, by getting the vast majority of people to behave sociably. Privacy isn't a new problem. It's existed in all human societies for as long as there have been human societies. Lawyers have solved it. Doctors have solved it. Priests have solved it. Friends have solved it. They've solved it by creating social structures which discourage monstrous behavior. We even have words for people who violate the often unwritten and unspoken rules governing the handling of delicate personal information; in the old days we called a man who was careless with others' secrets a "cad". Nowadays we use another word (a word which also has an anatomical denotation, if you're wondering).
Technology can't solve privacy problems, because they're not technology problems. But technology can make privacy problems worse, by making it easy to do antisocial things, or by making it hard to recognize the sensitivity of personal information and lowering our awareness that we're in a social situation and need to behave sociably; online spaces like Facebook, whose rules for handling private information are often opaque to users, create unnecessary privacy hazards in this way (see Ian Glazer's "Privacy Mirror" experiment for an example of how opaque privacy settings can undermine the sociability of an online space).
If we accept the technology frame and let technologists define privacy as control over dissemination of information, we ARE going to have less privacy. Resisting the technology frame is critical; if we don't resist it, lots of bad things happen. For example, if we accept the "privacy is defined as control of secrecy" frame, then we will start to believe (perhaps as a society, and perhaps even as a matter of law) that as soon as someone learns a piece of information about us, that information is no longer private, and we lose subsequent protections.
We don't have to accept the technology frame.
The assumption that led technologists to create the technology frame - that the social problem of getting people to behave sociably cannot be solved - amounts to an assumption that we will all be monsters.
This assumption is neither true nor acceptable. We've got to fight the technologists on this one.
Worldviews have consequences. A worldview that says "privacy is an illusion" can create a world in which there is no privacy, at least online.
My generation makes a distinction between the online world and "the real world". My kids' generation does not. The social world they live in will BE the online world - woven inextricably with what I grew up calling "the real world". I'm not willing to stand idly by and watch the sociability of that world destroyed by technologists who have given up because they can't see beyond their coding pads.
DiMaio concludes his post this way:
The problem for us, all of us, is that somebody will be watching all the time. We’d better behave.
The implied subtext is "because whoever's watching will be a monster, and turn us in to the authorities, and we'll be punished".
DiMaio is deeply irresponsible to encourage the view that just because the cryptographers can't give us a cloak of invisibility online it's OK to be a monster.
But he's right that we'd better behave. When we see someone else's private information, we'd better avert our gaze. We'd better not gossip about it. We'd better be sociable. Because otherwise we won't need the telescreen - we'll already have each other. And we'll get the society we deserve.
We are our brothers' keepers. We'd better start acting like it.
Technologists have a critical role to play in protecting privacy - but that role isn't building walls of secrecy. It's in building sociable spaces in the electronic world.
A sociable space is one in which people's social and antisocial actions are exposed to scrutiny so that normal human social processes can work.
A space in which tagging a photograph publicizes not only the identities of the people in the photograph but also the identities of the person who took the photograph and the person who tagged the photograph is more sociable than a space in which the only identity revealed is that of the person in the photograph - because when the picture of Jimmy holding a martini washes up on the HR department's desk, Jimmy will know that Johnny took it (at a private party) and Julie tagged him - and the conversations humans have developed over tens of thousands of years to handle these situations will take place.
A space in which personal information (a health record, say) always comes with metadata indicating who collected it, for what purpose it was collected, and under what terms and conditions it may be used is more sociable than a space in which a piece of personal information may be forwarded into another organization by someone who doesn't even know the information is personal. And so on.
At Burton Group we don't think privacy is an illusion. We think it's a hard issue - very hard - but that's why we're here: to give practical advice on hard issues. Ian Glazer and I have recently updated the privacy coverage our research and analysis customers get as part of their subscription. But privacy is so important and so widely misunderstood that we've decided to release our recent paper free to the public. It's here.
We hope you'll read it. We also hope you'll get in touch. Leave us comments here on the blog, email us, or call and ask for a dialog - even if you're not a customer.
