Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology ... - The ICHRP

themselves were reproduced in online newspapers. The Guardian blurred the exsoldier’s
face, thereby rendering her strangely equivalent to the blindfolded detainees:
three persons in one frame, all of their faces hidden by third parties. Haaretz reproduced
the picture untouched: the ex-soldier is the only recognizable individual of the three,
looking confidently at the camera, her identity as much on display as her uniform.
Indeed, public outrage over the photos was presumably not aroused because a private
issue had been made public, but the reverse. Critics were not calling on the photographer
to change her privacy settings – they were not demanding that she keep the issue in
private. Just the reverse, they were objecting that a public matter (army treatment of
detainees) had been treated as though it were private (“my summer holidays”).
The army’s treatment of prisoners is arguably an inherently public matter – appropriate
for public discussion, public policy and public interest. That the ex-soldier placed her
photographs in the public sphere by mistake (rather than deliberately) indicated that she
had missed their public significance entirely. Whether or not she had acted improperly
as a public person – a soldier – she seemed to have acted improperly as a private
person by forgetting or showing disrespect for the proper bounds of public discourse
and the tenor appropriate to public statements, and so bringing the public domain itself
into disrepute, as little more than a showcase for private whims.
Why is this story so discomfiting? Why was it reported at all? Are we troubled in part
by the photographer’s throwaway comment about “tagging” the detainees? Is there a
jolt of uncomfortable symmetry between the Facebook “tags” and the physical tags (the
manacles) on the detainees’ wrists? Is the remark a reminder of the relatively different
degrees of control (over privacy, self-projection, data) enjoyed by the ex-soldier and by
the detainees? The detainees who cannot browse, much less broadcast on, Facebook.
The ex-soldier who mobilises their data as part of her narrative (“IDF – the best time of my
life”). The contrast between her free private frivolity and their profoundly serious public
incarceration. The asymmetry of informational access and control between the soldier and
the detainees. (And yet, as it turned out, she was unable to control it after all...)
Structure of the Discussion Paper
This Discussion Paper looks at a constellation of issues that these three examples
illustrate. First, it examines the contemporary phenomenon of data ubiquity: its collection,
storage, analysis and uses, all of which impinge on our lives. It explores the ways in
which we create data ourselves, often discarding it without a thought, and the ways in
which we make ourselves (and are made by others) into “data subjects”.
The Discussion Paper also reconsiders the idea of “privacy”, the lens through which
this set of problems has traditionally been addressed. It looks back over the history
of contemporary ideas of privacy and the many ways in which this notion informs our
behaviour and shapes our expectations. It looks at different applications of the language
of privacy and at how the ubiquity of personal data (and the context that produces it)
appear to be transforming the notion, perhaps beyond recognition.
Thirdly, the Discussion Paper considers human rights. International treaties refer to
The Facebook photo album was entitled: “the IDF – the greatest years of my life”.
According to Haaretz, “During [an] Army Radio interview, [the ex-soldier] repeatedly said that it had
never occurred to her that ‘the picture would be problematic’”.
Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology, Human Rights