To Protect and to Project: Another Take on Digital Privacy

The subject of “personal data protection,” long the exclusive domain of experts and activists, has recently earned its political pedigree.

The French Edvige file, the endless extension of Google’s services, Facebook’s use of personal data, biometric IDs, contact-less chips have all sparked heated public discussions that, in many case, have forced businesses and governments into (albeit temporary) backtracking. Europe’s data protection authorities, gathered within the G29, have taken a firm stance (PDF) on issues such as social networking, RFID tags, and video surveillance. In the U.S., the Mecca of contractual freedom, growing numbers now speak out for more encompassing and stricter legislation.

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Guest author Daniel Kaplan is the author of the newly published Digital Privacy and Active Identities (Informatique, Libertés, Identités, Fyp Editions, edition available on eBook). This article briefly presents the book’s philosophy, which could be summarized by the following statement: “The value of privacy is that it enables us to go public!” Kaplan is the founder of Fondation Internet Nouvelle Génération (FING).

A Bitter Victory

However, there is little to rejoice over.

Governments and businesses have never enjoyed such powerful, ubiquitous and discreet means of tracking or monitoring private citizens. Individuals have no more control over what organizations know about them than they did yesterday… probably less. At the very least, the imbalance of knowledge – and thus power – between individuals and organizations, is not diminishing. The legal and technical means to protect oneself exist. But they remain unfamiliar and unloved, seen as foreign bodies both by organizations and individuals.

In fact, individuals actually seem to take a perverse pleasure in doing the exact opposite of what privacy advocates expect them to do. They hardly contribute to their own protection. They appear to be ready to reveal their most intimate details at the drop of a hat, for the price of a plate of beans.

They expose themselves on the Web and through social networking. "What’s wrong with people?" ask those who have been trying to protect them for the last 30 years. Then they turn to a nice, reassuring answer: people are “paradoxical”, they declare themselves generally worried at the nibbling away of their privacy, and yet their practical actions in no way reflect their attitudes.

Accusing people of being paradoxical won’t get us very far, though. Let us explore another hypothesis: that these practices in fact adhere to some sort of rationality (or coherence), based on the value we place on the power to project ourselves into the world and towards others.

Protect and Project

What this means is that we can’t separate individual protection and projection: Individuals will only act on the former if they are empowered to the latter.

Identity is not a fixed property, provided once and for all, to be simply guaranteed and protected. It is a continuous, multifarious construction, which combines internal and external, objective and subjective, perennial and ephemeral factors. It is above all a social construction. Identity is defined in relation to others, as explained by Daniel Solove, among many others.

Privacy is the starting point from which we reach out to others and to which we return to reflect on our experiences, only to move outward again. Private life only makes sense if it forms the basis… for our public life! Individuals will only act on protecting the former if it helps them endow the latter with richness, diversity, creativity, pleasure and efficiency.

Protecting their privacy has value for individuals. Yet this value is weighed against others: increasing and maintaining social networks, improving one’s reputation, sharing passions, saving time and gaining access to services. When protection conflicts with projection, protection doesn’t always win.

Yet most privacy laws focus exclusively on protection.

Next page: What If… ?

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