Saturday, July 17, 2010

Online Privacy, Google and Facebook

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Google's court case in Italy is a big deal. As everyone is saying, if Google can be held accountable for the content it syndicates on its site, that would change the way that information flows through the internet forever. It could close the whole thing down.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to throw out some loosely connected ideas on the subject of Google, privacy rights, etc. Maybe some of them will stick:

First, this case seems to be less about principled differences between Continental and American conceptions of privacy, and more about Berlusconi's media holdings. Italy has a pretty screwed up media environment; and its internet usage is among the lowest in Europe.

Second, more generally, I'm not really bullish on privacy rights mostly because I don't know exactly what that term means. As a lay person (not a lawyer), it's always struck me that most "privacy violations" are actually just other legal violations in disguise -- that posting a video of an autistic teenager being bulllied is actually an issue of harassment, libel and property theft, not "privacy" itself. Is it possible to understand privacy without these other constituent ideas? And if not, then how can we even try to create a coherent online privacy regime?

And further, as someone who thinks that American community is worth caring about, I'm struck that the problem of our country is not that we have too little privacy but that we demand too much. It's clear that in America at least our lives are more private than they ever were before -- our music is listened to privately, we commute in private vehicles, and the notion of a neighborhood, where people know each others' names and keep up on their lives, has all but vanished. Our private lives are very big -- filled with cell phones, iPods, laptops, etc -- and our public lives are increasingly small.

Third, the problem with data sharing on the internet to me is not that anyone can see the information I post (I can clearly, if imperfectly, decide these days what information I release and to whom); the problem is that the information never goes away. On Facebook -- unlike in real life -- everything sticks, nothing vanishes, my past is there forever. It's been said that the greatest feature of the human brain is its ability to forget. Otherwise, how could we deal with all the of data points of daily life? How could we create meaning or priorities? The under-discussed problem with the internet, to me, is not privacy, but total, unforgiving memory.

Fourth, given all of the above, it is true that Google/Facebook does do a lot of creep shit with our data, and we would be well served to be wary of that. Every college student should check out this interview with an anonymous (oh the irony!) Facebook employee. "Q: When you say “click on somebody’s profile,” you mean you save our viewing history?/ A: That’s right. How do you think we know who your best friends are?"

Good question! Excerpts from the interview beneath the fold...

Photo attribution: Flickr stream of Aboca

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