For years, I have been wanting to write a blog post or a paper or a rant or something about how privacy is not the same as secrecy. And how one aspect that’s almost always missing when it comes to discussions of how to protect privacy is that of personal ethics. Bob Blakley (with whom I have occasionally collaborated) wrote that essay instead. So now I don’t have to.
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.
[...]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 [...]
Lots more good stuff in this essay, including suggestions of how technologists can approach this challenge in a way that offers potential solutions, rather than just a limited and overly-restrictive view of the problem. Bob expands more in comments and this particularly resonated with me:
[saying] we’d better behave” is just abhorrent, at least to me – if it means, as I think you intend it to mean, “never do anything you don’t want to see in the New York Times.["] I will not acquiesce in turning my society into a herd of Stasi collaborators continually on the lookout for excuses to destroy one another.
Double points to Bob for quoting Rushdie’s “Step Across This Line.”
Related is a post I wrote for CurrentMom on privacy and the importance of context: Not Yer Mama’s Privacy Policy.
