Privacy
Issues in Convergent Digital Environments
November 23rd, it’s a cold evening in
Prague and my flat mates and I are bored enough to google our own names to see
what comes up. Just for the fun of it. My friend introduces my full name in the
search engine and… Oh my god. Why are
my pictures all over the place? As I go through the search results, I’m
(slightly) freaking out. How come all of my personal information and pictures
are so readily accessible to anyone?
In our contemporary digital environment, where our
social lives take place more and more through social media, privacy has become
a major issue. But what is privacy exactly?
According to John Thompson, privacy can be defined in
terms of an individual’s capacity over the revelations which can be made (by
others) about themselves. However, the proliferation of new communication
technologies has produced a shift of paradigm in the nature of the public and
the private spheres. In contemporary societies, due to the introduction of new
media, and especially the web 2.0 and social networking, the boundaries between
public and private have become blurred and porous, subject to constant
negotiation and struggle.
This can be perfectly illustrated by what Danah Boyd
calls Facebook’s “privacy trainwreck”. When Zuckerberg’s company introduced the
Newsfeeds feature in Facebook in 2006, users were startled and even upset.
Their every move on the platform was now easily visible, and even though this
information had never actually been secret,
the game’s rules had now changed, and users didn’t really know what to expect
anymore. A change in the architecture
of the boundary between public and private had occurred and this understandably
alarmed users. As Boyd puts it, privacy is not a binary question. Something
isn’t either “private” or “not – private”, but rather, privacy is a concept
which is highly context – dependent.
User protests forced Facebook to introduce new privacy
features, indispensable in a platform where the default value is total
exposure. These have been reinforced with time, to the extent that now it is
possible to view your Facebook profile like a stranger, or any user in
particular, would.
Going back to my “eye-opening experience”, we must
then visit the term “digital track”. This refers to the data connections which
are created between our online navigation habits and our personal information. This
“digital tracking”, as we may call it, is used by companies for commercial
purposes. Ever wondered why the adverts you find, scattered here and there
throughout your social networks, seem to actually match, to a surprising degree
of precision, your actual tastes?
Whenever we introduce our personal details to register
in a web page, any company with a code in the site can have access to them,
unless the former actively seeks to avoid this. Furthermore, whenever we enter
a site which includes Facebook like or
Twitter tweet buttons, we actually
take the risk that the personal information contained in our social network
profile will become linked to the site we are visiting and the products we are
browsing.
Companies have really taken an interest in this form
of tracing of users’ online behavior, as a study by the Wall Street Journal
(“What they know” – 2012) shows.
Enterprises such as the company Dataium are
specialized in gathering and providing such data about potential consumers to
sellers, so that they have access to privileged information before the costumer
even gets to the point of sale. However, this trafficking of Internet users’
data involves many ethical concerns on where to draw the line.
Web-tracking companies argue that their doing is
justified by the fact that the information they supply to other businesses is
always anonymous. Yet, the WSJ study showed that many of the investigated webs
leaked information which allowed third parties to identify the particular user,
and that much of this data was of a sensitive nature. Which just comes to
confirm that what is to be considered public or private is unclear in the
online world.
But, then again, as users we have accepted that this
loss in privacy is compensated by the perks that the web 2.0, with its
possibilities for interaction and participation, and online social networks
provide. Or have we? In Boyd’s words, the cost of social convergence is the
privacy train wreck. But still. Perhaps we have been ill-informed about to what
extent we are trading our anonymity for the many benefits of online
socializing.
In any case, it will never hurt to revise our own
privacy configurations on social media, and to observe some basic precautions
when it comes to online handling of personal data. Here go some tips to
maintain a minimum degree of online privacy (and to not make life so easy for
web-tracking companies):
1. Use
safe passwords. Obvious, right?
Apparently not so much, though. Passwords to our social network profiles (and
for that reason, to any online account you may own) should contain at least 8
alphanumerical characters and not refer to anything obvious, such as birth
dates. Your dog’s name? Not such a good idea.
In the same way you would always lock your front door before leaving the
house, you have to get a safe password for your social media. And don’t share
it with others, please.
2. Privacy
configurations. It is recommendable to set our social network privacy in a way
only our friends can see our posts and pictures (even though a Facebook friend may only be an acquaintance –
again, a shift in concepts from our physical to our online social circles – so
it’s a good idea to give a second thought to what we publish online. E.g. It
may not be the best thing to post that photo of Saturday’s party, after one too
many shots of tequila, if you have your boss on Facebook, you follow me,
right?). There’s some weird people out there you don’t want peeking into your
pics. And if you don’t believe me, give this app a try:
Creepy, right?
3. Check
whether the pages you visit contain the https
protocol, which means you’re on safe navigation mode.
4. Including
really personal information on our profile, which will make us easily
identifiable, isn’t a safe bet. Home address, telephone numbers… better not. Duh. And, as you may have guessed,
geo-tagged photos aren’t the best option either.
5. Erasing
cookies when browsing through different sites is also a good idea. This will
difficult web-tracking, and, for instance, won’t bring up the prices of plane
tickets when you’re searching for one to purchase on different webs.
These are just some very simple recommendations (not trying to offend your media
literacy here, guys) which may help to ensure at least a bare minimum of
privacy protection online. If such thing as privacy exists anymore, in this
new, convergent, web-tracked, crazy digital environment, that is.
I mean, I did all of this and my pictures were all
over the place anyway. So.
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