On privacy and publicy in the new era – in response to Stowe Boyd

Privacy is a very personal matter. It is age, culture, country….. and personality related. Online and offline we are basically the same person, even if we choose to act differently in the physical and virtual worlds.

Is privacy dead? That’s a long  and old debate. Has anything fundamental changed?

Stowe Boyd challenges traditional definitions of publicy and privacy and claims that because of the fundamental difference between the physical and virtual worlds, we cannot translate physical world notions of privacy into the virtual world, where interactions are only time and not place related. Because of new definitions of publicy  in the new decade, privacy will disappear.

I beg to differ.

The web has added a new dimension to our interactions. Technologies and platforms empower its etheric nature  to become an extension of the physical world with communication ubiquity almost a natural reality.  Today, you don’t need to be physically somewhere in order to be there. Phone calls, video conferencing, camera enhanced chats, emails, blogs, tweets….  Empower your presence in other than its physical manifestations.

As the web increasingly becomes our natural habitat, as individuals we have the same rights to disclose at our will information about ourselves.  It has nothing to do with our physical presence. As an increasing part of our interactions is web borne, rules, practices, codes of conduct and dos and don’t , apply to our feeling of well being, safety, privacy security.

It is individual.

The notion of a private home can be equaled on the web to a private self, the right to individually decide if and to what extent open or close the  personal information tap. Just as in the physical world I can and should  feel anxious about the way in which I can be monitored and traced by surveillance cameras and tracking of my whereabouts through my cellular device, so I can and should be worried about the ways in which I am monitored and targeted online unknowingly and without my consent.

My information IS my property. Look at the billions$ industries that evolve around online informations. There is hardly today any aspect that does not have an online arm as a commercial entity and with means of communications.

Geo-spatial of the physical and temporal aspects of the virtual are not criteria by which my personal data can and should be compromised. There is a lot about gender, age-group, ethnicity… that is obvious in the physical world once someone looks at you and can be easily concealed or distorted online – but as a human being it does not make me less entitled to have the keys in my hands as to  how much I open the door, to whom and under what circumstances.

Privacy infringement is mostly about profitability, brand power struggles and business hegemony. Old battles fought now  in new waters.  Corporates’ interests in our private information travel freely between the physical and virtual worlds. When consentual supply is not enough for the growing demand for our data, private information piracy, in the name of quality of service, supposedly for our own good, is not legitimate and should not be  encouraged or taken as a lesser evil, online or offline.

The new frontier  for this battle is now our virtual social spheres – virtual social habitats to which they want to tap into, wherever we are, eager  for our info and use us, many times without us even being aware , for their marketing purposes.

The augmented sociality, as Stowe Boyd calls it, enables us to remain faceless in the social sphere, and so our interactions remain faceless. He claims that

Those raised in this brave new world are already living in a cultural context based on publicy, and therefore they are running afoul of social conventions based on privacy. Publicy says that each self exists in a particular social context, and all such contracts are independent.

I see the expression of the self in the virtual world differently. As it is about people, the individually personal context in which we interact within our social spheres, is what humanizes the virtual publicy. I believe that each of us is the sum total of all our interactions, not in a particular social context, but as part of a totally harmonized webbing presence. We are Itoms in a people’s grid. As such it gives us the right to completely cloak, openly share all or partially expose as per relevance to a certain interaction or social thread.

No doubt the digital natives, born into a web based reality have different attitudes and views than boomers who are a product of physical world concepts, but the borders of private sharing and public displaying remain a very personal decision. An interesting survey conducted among 2500 youngsters about their privacy concerns in their interactions in social networks indicated that private may be extended, in their eyes, from a private self, to the boundaries of that social sphere, but within that perimeter, they have privacy concerns that put clear boundaries between virtual privacy and publicy.

To top that, the web is not just about generations x, y,z. Today, for the first time in history, there are more older people than younger, and with life longevity, for many years to come, digital natives and digital immigrants, importing to the web different world views and exposure norms, will live side by side, equal citizens in the virtual space, and all should have accessibility to publicy and privacy practices that suit each of them individually.

Once you refute the assumption that specific social norms applicable online or offline must gain the consent of a significant majority to become a legitimate life practice, and embrace an attitude that regards each individual’s equal prerogatives to decide for herself the spectrum of her privacy boundaries, there is no blurring or confusion.

The technological capabilities of cross referencing private information about me  and what I share with my friends from various social spheres I am present at, data mining from commercial sites, public sector databases, can have privacy implications in the real world, as  civilians and as people in a free society.

The fluxing of the notions of publicy and privacy and legitimization  of breaches of privacy norms in the name of a new virtual publicy, are dangerous, because they can lead to anarchy with blurred boundaries between virtual and physical, and the implications can be far reaching.

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