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

IV.
Privacy across Borders: Personal Space,
Technology and States
Strikingly, the principal bodies of work this Discussion Paper has drawn on thus far refer
to a quite specific corner of the world: that part traditionally known as the “West” or
“North”. The problems with which it is concerned, however – technology, human rights,
data, surveillance, and privacy – are not so geographically limited.
Two possible reasons for this present themselves:
1. The story of privacy and technology is a “Western” story that has been rehearsed
and retold in the West for generations, well before it was refocused by information
technology.
2. It is “Western” because the explosion of information technologies has its origins in
the countries of the West and until recently has been concentrated there (though
this is no longer the case).
This gap – between the loci of debate of this problem and the loci of its effects – matters
because in the future, the issues this Discussion Paper has discussed may become more
problematic elsewhere in the world, for reasons partly related to the existence of this gap.
This is because, for structural reasons (technological, legal, historical, political, economic),
we might expect surveillance and data harvesting to be if anything more invasive and less
inhibited outside the traditional West. We will return to these structural reasons in a moment.
The gap also matters because many of the arguments and claims usually raised in
the privacy-technology debate treat geographical location as fundamentally incidental.
They consider a relationship between ideas, ideologies and specific processes (e.g.,
of technological engagement, of government, of identity construction), all of which are
today energetically in circulation far beyond the West. At least in terms of availability,
these ideas, ideologies and processes can make a solid claim to universality, even if it
is clear that they carry more weight in some places than others.
But these are nevertheless local ideas, ideologies and processes. They have their
origins in a particular set of historical and social events and circumstances. Their
history, although it circulates globally as a universal metaphor – and is a narrative of
modernisation that in principle might take place anywhere – also remains specific to
its locality. Precisely because it is so easy to move to universality in this domain, it is
important to notice that, as a matter of fact, location is not incidental: both the intensity of
the dataverse and the armoury of resistance to it vary dramatically from place to place.
It is important to notice that location is not incidental: both the intensity of the dataverse
and the armoury of resistance to it vary dramatically from place to place.
The gap matters for a third reason: because it is likely to remain. The more ambitious
extensions of the dataverse (such as into “ambient intelligence” in Europe, as related in
Chapter 6) are unlikely ever to be universalised, given the extraordinary technological (and
so economic) intensity they require and the numerous restraints on global economic growth
we can expect in the future (climate change being an obvious one). It is not unthinkable
that the dramatic existing wealth imbalance will translate into a two-tier technological world,
one dominated by technocultural self-expression, the other by pervasive dataveillance.
Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology, Human Rights 35