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

With regard to identity (the boundary between self and other) Palen and Dourish note
that “social or professional affiliations set expectations that must be incorporated into
individual behaviour”. These shape, for example, what email accounts we use and
the existence of corporate disclaimers on email signatures. 205 Beyond this, however,
electronic communications escape our control in countless ways before they have even
left our screens and keyboards.
In unmediated “face-to-face” interactions, we depend on reflexivity to gauge the
response of our interlocutors to our interventions and modify them accordingly. In the
dataverse, however, this capacity is diminished because our audiences are less present
to us in time or space. Our communications are insistently mediated, meaning not just
that they exist primarily within media but also that they are both less responsive to their
immediate context and also liberated to persist in other contexts.
Our communications are insistently mediated, meaning not just that they exist
primarily within media but also that they are both less responsive to their
immediate context and also liberated to persist in other contexts.
To borrow a motif from Chapter 2, since the nature of our contact with interlocutors is
increasingly mediated, boundary negotiation is often likely to take place primarily with
regard to the dataverse itself, and only secondarily with the others sharing that space
with us. This means not only that we may expect even our most private utterances to
become public eventually, but we may even configure them with that in view.
With regard to time, Palen and Dourish point out that “technology’s ability to easily
distribute information and make ephemeral information persistent” too tends to erode
our capacity to manage our data. Whereas we approach questions of disclosure and
identity in the present, having both past experience and future impact in mind, in the
dataverse our awareness of, and response to, the sequential (and consequential)
nature of our choices is blunted. The internet’s “perfect memory” means that we risk
being linked forever to each small statement, wise or witless, casually emitted from our
keyboard. 206 In his book Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger remembers that the capacity
to forget has been an important if unremarked virtue of both individuals and society, but
it is now at risk of being lost. Unforgotten can easily mean unforgiven.
As Palen and Dourish note, “technology itself does not directly support or interfere
with personal privacy; rather it destabilizes the delicate and complex web of regulatory
practices”. Mayer-Schönberger tells us that technology continuously decontextualises
and recontextualises personal information, leaving it irremediably “out of context” and
available to misinterpretation. 207 But, he concludes, people adapt their behaviour and will
seek to stabilize privacy management, perhaps through increasing self-censorship.
At this point, it begins to seem that the old distinction between a “virtual” and a “real”
world no longer holds. Virtual communication is real communication. What one does in
the virtual world, online, not only leaves traces in the real world but is, in fact, behaviour
in the real world (perhaps it always was). More to the point, however, the real world itself
is saturated in “virtual” mechanisms – there is increasingly no outside to the internet.
205 Ibid., 4.
206 Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Princeton University Press
(2009), 13.
207 Mayer-Schönberger (2009), 90.
64 Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology, Human Rights