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

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
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