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

The individual thus operates from the outset on the basis of trust – trust in the corporate
entities that operate these poorly understood systems and also in the state to enforce
certain assumed standards. Trust must, to a degree, also underpin the relative insouciance
concerning the expansion of non-voluntary monitoring of the individual through satellite
and CCTV tracking. Trust appears to be the norm even when non-voluntary monitoring is
conducted by private actors in areas such as license-plate monitoring, radio frequency
identification (RFI) and geotagging. 59 But this relentless demand for trust is presumably
also always under stress.
The individual operates from the outset on the basis of trust – trust in the
corporate entities that operate these poorly understood systems and also in
the state to enforce certain assumed standards.
The Private Self in an Expanding Dataverse
Jodi Dean takes these ideas a few steps further. She points out that the problem is
not simply that we must place trust in a conglomeration of public and private actors
to manage our data, nor merely that our trust is constantly under strain – it is also that
we increasingly look to the production of information about ourselves as a means of
gauging who we are, as private persons in the public sphere:
People’s experience of themselves as subjects is configured in terms
of accessibility, visibility, being known. Without publicity, the subject of
technoculture doesn’t know if it exists at all. It has no way of establishing
that it has a place within the general sociosymbolic order of things, that it is
recognized… Publicity in technoculture functions through the interpellation
of a subject that makes itself an object of public knowledge. 60
At issue is the emergence of the private person into the public sphere, in which they
are ratified as private persons. “Being known” – that is, configuring oneself as a data
subject – can, of course, manifest in many ways. It may involve being published or
gaining a title of some sort, or it may simply mean turning up in a Google search, or
having a blog or “Facebook friends”. 61
Being known – that is, configuring oneself as a data subject – can, of course,
manifest in many ways. It may involve being published or gaining a title of
some sort, or it may simply mean turning up in a Google search, or having a blog
or “Facebook friends”.
It may also mean being a victim: “for the victim to matter politically, it has to become
public, to be made visible, accessible. Those who aren’t known are not victims. They
the context for industry competition over consumer trust (see Soghoian (2010)); and by the recent bank
debacle when, despite massive betrayal of trust, increased regulation is still unavailable.
59 See, for example, this New York Times report on geotagging: “Mr. [Adam] Savage said he knew about
geotags. (He should, as host of a show popular with technology followers.) But he said he had neglected
to disable the function on his iPhone before taking the picture and uploading it to Twitter. ‘I guess it was
a lack of concern because I’m not nearly famous enough to be stalked,’ he said, ‘and if I am, I want a
raise’.” Kate Murphy, “Web Photos That Reveal Secrets, Like Where You Live”, The New York Times,
August 11, 2010.
60 Dean (2002), 114.
61 Dean (2002), 121.
22 Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology, Human Rights