Overview

One of the chief claims in Helen Nissenbaum’s book, Privacy in Context, is that there is a dimension of privacy that is not captured by the other analyses we have read. She calls this privacy in public. The idea is that I can be out in public and yet the information about who I am and where I am going is effectively private. It’s privacy by anonymity. If you follow me or plant a tracking device on me, then this privacy is lost.

There is an analogy with the internet. When we use internet services, we are effectively leaving our private spaces and entering the spaces controlled by companies. In that way, using the internet is like being out in public. Where things are going wrong, she thinks, is that we think of ourselves as enjoying the privacy of anonymity online when we’re actually being tracked and followed.

That is one reason why people worry about the loss of privacy on the internet. It is also why the solutions proposed under the heading of transparency and consent fail to address the problem. We’re being tracked but don’t think of it that way. Various efforts to get us to consent or appreciate what is going on all fail: we don’t read the small print, don’t think it through, or need to use the services enough to sacrifice our privacy.

Her proposal is that we look for analogies between internet services and activities in real life. For example, banks don’t track you after you visit an ATM, so bank sites shouldn’t do so either. That, she thinks, will bring our online activities more into line with our expectations of privacy.

Our discussion

I’m tight on time right now, so I can’t get down a meaningful description of our discussion. Quite a lot of it surrounded the question of whether her article is obsolete. For instance, movies are rented online now and the video rental stores that she refers to are out of business. Since that is so, the real life activities that are supposed to guide our thinking about privacy online either aren’t there or they aren’t forming our expectations about privacy.

It seems to me that the behavior of college students is changing. You are a lot more circumspect about your online presence than your predecessors were, for example. After class, Bryce sent me an article by a milennial discussing this. It’s good! But I take one exception to its theme. The author’s argument is that people your age don’t worry about what might happen because the worst has already happened: privacy is already gone. I think most of us experience the loss of privacy so far as fairly benign. I would be surprised if things could not get much, much worse.

Main ideas

These are the main points you should know or have an opinion about from today’s class.

1. Privacy in public.
2. Nissenbaum’s contextual approach to regulating privacy online.