Week 12 Reading Response

This week's reading touched on privacy from a few different perspectives. I'll be honest. I've always taken the view on privacy that Max Schrems has - which is that personally, I'm "interested in privacy more in principle than it practice." I'd even take it a step further and say that I generally get bored hearing or reading about privacy.

Privacy should be a basic human right but even if it were, it would still get complicated whenever we decide to invite companies like Facebook and Google into our personal lives. Whether they admit to it or not, Facebook and Google have gotten a lot of mileage out of treating users' privacy as a courtesy they extend rather than a basic right. The people who tend to react the most to articles like the one on electronic snoops in email eventually end up getting off Facebook for good once they realize this. Every complication I've ever seen written as stemming from privacy in the digital age can be traced to this harsh reality - to users, privacy is a right, to companies, it is a courtesy.

These complications are nothing new, which is maybe why I get so bored seeing myriad think-pieces written about them that try to present each new complication as something urgent. Facebook is always going to collect information on you. It's how it keeps the lights on. A dozen Max Schrems aren't suddenly going to make the company re-evaluate and change course.

The article on Schrems did get me thinking about what the clear difference is between public vs. private online. The guy is reported to have been shocked to see information he thought he'd deleted still being stored by Facebook. While I sympathize, I think Facebook's explanation that it was a conversation between two friends, one of which had not deleted their copy of the exchange might actually be fair. It got me thinking that something shared between two people could be understood between both people as private but the levels of privacy involved in sharing that thing could differ depending on who you ask. Schrems obviously thought it was something worth deleting but his friend did not. Who does Facebook defer to when deciding just how private the information is? This is an issue that clearly went beyond merely tweaking a privacy setting and I'd be interested to see more cases like this and how they turned out.

The pew survey on data collection isn't really that revelatory. The findings on "do not disturb" zones did get me thinking about what constitutes as "do not disturb" zones online. In the reading, they use the word "home." In our increasingly connected world, where exactly does outside end and home begin?