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

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On this view, information and communication technologies reinvigorated and problematised the public sphere at a moment when the private realm was being revitalised economically and socially (as we saw in Chapter 1). Although not her principal theme, Dean’s focus helps us to understand how public and private were mutually reconstructed in changed conditions where communications, information-sharing, self-projection and ubiquitous multidirectional monitoring were in rapid expansion. Given that the generation and communication of information is essential to the knowledgecreating function of the public sphere, the question is: how do individuals understand, access, use and create information in a world of ubiquitous data? How does their engagement with information technology influence their understanding of themselves as participants in a technological public – as private persons, interacting publicly, using data as a medium? As Dean points out, since the quest for knowledge typifies the individual’s (bidirectional) engagement with information technologies, it is assumed that there are things to know out there, things still unknown that should be known, but not all of which will necessarily be known. The existence, discovery, and preservation of secrets, in short, is fundamental to the public sphere. The public, as it operates in practice, is driven by the desire to uncover secrets, to find out what really happened – if the President slept with his intern, whether intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s “WMD” was exaggerated or fabricated, whether banks exercise undue political influence, and so on. The existence, discovery, and preservation of secrets is fundamental to the public sphere. The public, as it operates in practice, is driven by the desire to uncover secrets, to find out what really happened. But at the same time, our participation as members of the public increasingly takes place online – indeed we become members of the public in part through our online presence. We project ourselves, or honed images of ourselves, into the public sphere and must also engage with information about us already circulating there as data subjects. Dean suggests that anxiety arises at numerous points along this public–private axis, in an information-rich public sphere energised by a preoccupation with secrecy, disclosure and self-disclosure. Anxiety arises where trust, knowledge and identity meet, raising questions that are central to contemporary technoculture. The Information Revolution and Trust How does exposure to and involvement in information technology shape our experience of ourselves as private persons? The old fear was of ceaseless surveillance and discipline. Yet, if Big Brother, the centralized controlling authority feared in the 1940s and 50s, never quite materialised, surveillance did not recede: quite the reverse. As Dean observes, today “a global network of Little Brothers trades in information”. 56 The rise of contemporary technoculture was pitched as an overthrow of the past’s controlling “technocracy”. It was revolutionary: out with the stifling conformism of the past; in with personal control over information creation and dissemination, liberating the individual. 57 The recent example, see Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin, 2009). 56 Dean (2002), 79–81. Dean takes the term Little Brother from, among other sources, workplace surveillance software released in the late 1990s. 57 In this context, Dean (83–84) recalls Apple’s 1984 ad dramatizing the abolition of the “1984” universe. 20 Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology, Human Rights
internet, when it arrived shortly thereafter, was to be the harbinger of a new democracy, a democracy without walls. In the background, the epitome of the private self: each person with his or her own terminal in nodal contact with “the Net”, cognitive, expressive and acquisitive, rational and transparent. In the foreground, a metastasizing body of information, opinions, news, sources, to sift through and assimilate. These trends aligned closely with the broader revitalisation of the ideal of the public–private divide over the same period. The internet was to be the harbinger of a new democracy, a democracy without walls. In the background, the epitome of the private self: each person with his or her own terminal in nodal contact with “the Net”, cognitive, expressive and acquisitive, rational and transparent. It may seem ironic that contemporary anxieties about privacy stem from the evolution of technological processes that were expected to liberate the private. The private person and private sector alike have become ever more autonomous over the last 30 years, have they not? If so, however, one predictable result might be the increasing fetishisation of the public–private divide itself, making the specifics of drawing the boundary line in any given instance more complex and contested. Nevertheless, the current malaise runs deep. It appears to concern the very principle of personal autonomy at a time when the private in other domains looks liberated. As a matter of empirical observation, we seem further from autonomy than ever. Today, we are monitored at all times by hundreds of public and private “Little Brothers”, many of whom appear to be neither equipped nor inclined to co-ordinate with one another. We spend hours each day being filmed and tracked and leave behind a staggering data trail without knowing how much is harvested or by whom or whether the databases that hold information on us are publicly or privately owned. And as mobile, GPS and nanotechnologies proliferate, it seems monitoring will increasingly universalise in future. We monitor one another; indeed, we are encouraged to do so. We spend hours each day being filmed and tracked and leave behind a staggering data trail without knowing how much is harvested or by whom or whether the databases that hold information on us are publicly or privately owned. Two considerations seem to be generally true. First, individuals exercise little control over the information collected about them: what is collected, by whom, how, how much, its storage, its use. Second, most members of the public appear to view this circumstance with comparative equanimity. This is well illustrated in the debate over “privacy controls” on Facebook and Google among others. These “user controls” are already several steps removed from the core technological processes of storage and retrieval; they assume that the parent company operates a prior and more extensive oversight. It seems to have become largely accepted as self-evident that the functioning of technological platforms will never (and need not) be understood or managed by users themselves. 58 58 As Weber noted, the general maintenance of trust in all these domains depends on trust-in-the-state, in that the state is always the final guarantor of any formal promise. Even here, in the last 30 years there would need to have been a surge in levels of trust-at-one-remove, since the state has widely trusted the private sector to set its own governance rules (a form of “delegated coercion” in Weber’s terms). This is illustrated in the privacy controls debate, where the state’s non-regulation of an area of clear public interest provides Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology, Human Rights 21
Page 1 and 2: Navigating the Dataverse Privacy, T
Page 3 and 4: Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy,
Page 5 and 6: Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy,
Page 7 and 8: Contents Acknowledgements Executive
Page 9: Acknowledgements This Discussion Pa
Page 12 and 13: As to the first, the Discussion Pap
Page 14 and 15: contesting profiles so long as cert
Page 16 and 17: ▪ Human rights organisations can
Page 18 and 19: gathering technologies as illustrat
Page 20 and 21: information is extensively gathered
Page 22 and 23: themselves were reproduced in onlin
Page 25 and 26: I. A Short History of Privacy Altho
Page 27 and 28: property. 20 This establishes the l
Page 29 and 30: Privacy must be viewed as an ideal
Page 31 and 32: During the 1980s, partly as a resul
Page 33 and 34: e removed merely by an effort of cl
Page 35 and 36: II. The Privacy-Technology Dynamic
Page 37: dataverse. Not only are there many
Page 41 and 42: simply are not - they don’t exist
Page 43 and 44: III. Security and Surveillance Havi
Page 45 and 46: When we talk about state surveillan
Page 47 and 48: stimulation of economic activity. S
Page 49 and 50: Digital Personhood How should we th
Page 51 and 52: Identity is therefore unitary and a
Page 53 and 54: IV. Privacy across Borders: Persona
Page 55 and 56: Where research on communications an
Page 57 and 58: The Expanding Dataverse Biometric I
Page 59 and 60: peoples of most countries, enormous
Page 61 and 62: Such protections do not shield indi
Page 63 and 64: V. Law, Privacy, Profiling This Dis
Page 65 and 66: Griswold set the pattern for one br
Page 67 and 68: terrorist”. 144 In Posner’s vie
Page 69 and 70: ut it has not so far accepted that
Page 71 and 72: 2. The Court turned to the practice
Page 73 and 74: normative statements on the substan
Page 75 and 76: individual may have multiple profil
Page 77 and 78: Let’s take another example: “ri
Page 79 and 80: VI. Boundaries and Borders We have
Page 81 and 82: process” to empirical research in
Page 83 and 84: As a result, communicational pruden
Page 85 and 86: Business School: “The amount of p
Page 87 and 88: the domain of international law. In
Page 89 and 90:
A U.S. Secret Service liaison poste
Page 91 and 92:
examples to the experience of a sho
Page 93 and 94:
Conclusion This Discussion Paper ha
Page 95:
The rise of contemporary data harve
Page 100:
This ICHRP Discussion Paper examine
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