Privacy notes circa 2019
#thought-socialStudies #thought-education #thought-mindset
Seeking Likes
Drawing faces is hard, mostly because it’s hard to practice. The stakes are socially higher than drawing other things. As a beginner when I would show my subjects their portrait, their face would often drop as if to say “Oh, that’s the way you see me?” My solution was to draw in a darkened theater while watching improv comedy shows. I did this for over a year, showing only my wife, Annette, who thought I was rude for drawing when I should be “paying attention to the show.”
My Facebook account remained untouched until a girl, who I’d been told thought I was cute, messaged me to tell me that I didn’t have anything on my Facebook page. Eager to impress, I added some drawings and she loved them. She even bought one. And this has been a microcosm of my Facebook experience.
In many ways, Facebook helped me see myself as the artist that others saw me to be. “Friends” saw my sketches and tagged the subjects, who then “liked” the posts. Facebook increased neither the amount nor quality of my drawings but rather gave motivation through my seeking attention. Before, when I drew in the darkened improv theater, I focused on not disturbing anybody. Then my Facebook celebrity gave me real life social status. Often I would be invited or get free tickets to shows and always I could cut the line to draw.
I loved the status but my fragile new identity as an artist was dependent on consistently creating something that people liked. I would count the likes by each photo. When I drew, I would become agitated and stressed until I’d drawn enough “quality” pictures that in my mind justified the approval of others. Every time a famous person made my drawing their Facebook profile picture my self esteem was justified, though of course, if they took it down or ignored it I was disappointed. Facebook helped me develop my public “artist” persona but it crippled my private art practice because it was so much more gratifying to have a writer from from UCB or 30 Rock tell me that my art was the best expression of capturing a show that they’d seen. As a result, my post-Facebook art is much more public-aware and insecure.
Growing up is different in a world with social media. Exacerbating the attention-seeking and peer approval that adolescents crave while documenting their mistakes online seems like it would create intense anxiety. Improvement is not always linear. Had I started posting my pictures to Facebook early on, I would likely not have progressed due to my self-criticism based on factors beyond my control and focusing “likes” over love of drawing. Additionally there would have been a chilling effect on putting work into something that didn’t generate likes.
Sunshine of a single self
I recently read the book World Without Mind and there’s a particular passage that stuck with me:
Though Facebook will occasionally talk about the transparency of governments and corporations, what it really wants to advance is the transparency of individuals—or what it has called, at various moments, “radical transparency” or “ultimate transparency.” The theory holds that the sunshine of sharing our intimate details will disinfect the moral mess of our lives. Even if we don’t intend for our secrets to become public knowledge, their exposure will improve society. With the looming threat that our embarrassing information will be broadcast, we’ll behave better. And perhaps the ubiquity of incriminating photos and damning revelations will prod us to become more tolerant of one another’s sins. Besides, there’s virtue in living our lives truthfully. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” Zuckerberg has said. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”’
“To get people to this point where there’s more openness—that’s a big challenge. But I think we’ll do it,” said Zuckerberg in 2010. “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.”
This commonsense notion of a single self is popular in tech and shared by my current employer, New Relic, which has as one of it’s five core values: “Authenticity: Being yourself at work.” One might at first dismiss it at meaningless because obviously neither HR nor legal will tolerate behavior they deem inappropriate. The only meaning I can infer is that the appropriateness of the workplace extends to my home as well by the transitive property of at-will employment.
What is not acknowledged in this breakdown of public and private is that the subjective lens through which we experience the self is as powerful in shaping perception as the self being observed.
Context doesn’t just matter, it provides the only method for expressing and experiencing the self, which is why we experience this as many selves. We act very differently from one context to another. A touch on the arm conveys something 240 characters never could. Hearing about our friend’s surgery while trying to catch a bus mediates the way we experience it, just as then “liking” the post does.
A human is not a human like a table is a table. We are not fixed but rather expressing and becoming. And the context in which we express ourselves is the paper on which we sketch who we are. Writes Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” Our children grow up in a world where they can see a single curated timeline, all watched over by algorithms of loving grace. But this doesn’t fit in with Facebook’s offering to the researchers, political hacks, and advertisers to whom they sell your data. Without tracking your “single self” they wouldn’t be able to microtarget you nearly as effectively.
Privacy vs Convenience
Explicitly shared information through speech-acts is one thing but maybe the passive leaking of metadata, things about ourselves of which we’re not even aware, is more frightening. In my own Google account there is a map of every time my phone checked in on geo-location along with a timeline like a browser history. So I could look it up and see exactly where I was on a given day since I returned the States from Buenos Aires. It’s so cool that I almost don’t want to delete it. Almost.
Humans have been observed by ancestors and gods since before history and that’s been positive in keeping us in line. Our politicians and corporations aren’t gods or spirits, just people with their own agendas.
What will be the effects on our children now that advertisers have been following them from moment they were born, through their parent’s Amazon purchases, through their GPS, their social media profile. We have created a surveillance state which can surround them with suggestions of what they need before they even realize they likely want it.
The bookmarking service, Pocket, bills its premium service like having a bookshelf of all your notes at your fingertips. But the law doesn’t treat it the same way as searching what you have on your person or in your house, but rather that you’ve shared the information with a third party. With our identities tracked to a single social graph, with Gmail searching our most intimate messages for the opportunity to market to us, with our cellphone networks viewing devices sales as a loss but our internet, GPS and message data as a profit center, when even our browsers in Incognito Mode leave tracks that may be impossible to cover, we trade privacy for convenience.
Am I worried that the government is going to look at everyone’s GPS data, calculate everyone’s speeding tickets for the past 10 years, and send everyone a bill? That seems like a fantasy, though the Zuckerbergs of the world might argue that fear of this potential might reduce speeding. “You’re not that interesting.” Goes the truism, and it’s right! I’m not so special that the NSA is watching me. But just because the NSA doesn’t currently have the computing power to process to search everyone’s emails at once doesn’t make me feel more comfortable about them keeping a database they can search by individual account.
Like Sauron’s Eye, the issue is the chilling effect of knowing that at any minute the eye or attention might be turned upon you. In the panopticon of everyday life we start to censor what we say to our friends, to be careful about who or what could hear us. I’m much more scared that a political dissident’s GPS data might be leaked, showing some specific indiscretions. Or that the fear of such leaking might make someone avoid public politics altogether out of fear that, when their information sliced and diced, it might reveal things that could be seen or interpreted in ways they never expected.
And what’s more likely? That that I get benefit from knowing where I was on a given minute 7 years ago or that I become “interesting” to someone or something that has the ability to search these things? How much are we willing to bet that we won’t have a reason to become “interesting”. We are building a future security apparatus.
The Middle Path
For the past few years I’ve practiced self-censorship. Instead of calling, writing, or texting my friends now, I’ve consumed information about them passively. I see from your app that you went for a run so I don’t need to do much except “like” it. Looking into the worlds of others through our panes of glass we have become lonely and isolated. I stayed on social media for a long time due to my FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) but when I discovered that a real life friend of mine was getting a sex change operation and hadn’t told me in person because it was posted on Facebook (and I’d missed the post) I decided I missing out doubly: on the information and on genuine experience.
I think a good working analogy for the information industrial complex is the food industrial complex. Manufacturing food has allowed our civilization to grow and feed the world but it’s come at a terrible cost. Historically I’ve not been very careful about my food, choosing convenience over privacy. Upon realizing the brutality in which animals are treated and manipulation behind the marketing of products that cause all kinds of health issues some people become radicalized, evangelical vegans. This is not my path. Rather, I want a kind of Michael Pollen version of privacy: simple rules that nudge you to a healthier place and set you up well to live a good life.
So I’m viewing the next phase of my life as a bit of a “privacy detox”, just going without some of the “junk food” conveniences that are fine once in awhile but probably lead to poor outcomes in larger amounts. Healthy diets aren’t about what you don’t eat but what you do eat. I’m also embracing actively reaching out to folks. Instead of writing a blog or Facebook posts that no one reads I’m writing individually to friends who I care about in the hopes of engaging real conversation. You’re the person I really want to talk to anyway.
While I now have an encrypted email server, it’s not very useful for privacy because no one else is using encryption. This is not a problem for me though. The real concern isn’t that all conversations must be secure and private, it’s that it should be relatively easy to actually be private should one need to. So please don’t feel like you have to write encrypted or secret messages to me.
The technical aspect is not difficult but two other issues arise: 1) It often hugely defeats the purpose of communication. For instance, if Gmail can’t read your messages, it makes it impossible to search, thereby defeating the utility of having them on Gmail in the first place. And 2) you have to get the person with whom you’re communicating to give up those conveniences as well. I don’t think everything needs to be encrypted but I like the idea that if it’s important I can speak in private and I’m setting up infrastructure to do so.
That said, if you’re excited to send encrypted email by using using PGP, how to do that is just a DuckDuckGo search away. Alternatively, Signal is an excellent texting service like Whatsapp that isn’t owned by Facebook, doesn’t collect metadata, and can’t read anything you write. I want to be clear though, it’s way more important that I can chat with friends than that the communication is private. However it’s very important to me that it’s relatively easy to communicate in a private way should the need arise.
I’m not going to pretend that my fears are rational. Personally, I’m just happy that this has given me an excuse to talk to folks and to bring focus to having meaningful conversations. Instead of debating the merits of informational junk-food I’m much happier to focus on the relationships I’d really like to have.