The Garden of Privacy
by Zelig and Sark
In the 21st century, information technologies have increasingly become ill-winds, snatching at personal data in our grasp.
From our hands, computers and phones capture more and more private information, including data about our personal interests, beliefs, and lives. Yes, technologies have granted us instant access to a seeming infinitude of information.
However, they have also provided a means to surrender so much to many others. We broadcast our lives to other people and businesses far beyond what our ancestors 50 years ago could have possibly imagined. The privacy landscape has changed profoundly.
Unlike them, we must remain vigilant to keep control over where information about ourselves goes and who accesses it. For many, this effort is far too much. How do we come to terms with such different opinions on privacy? How do we help ourselves and others brace against the ill-winds of technology and protect the delicate information ecosystem to ensure its many fruits remain nourishing, rather than turn poisonous?
Technology has enabled us to communicate with the world extensively. We can use computers to make a living, play games, or communicate with others across the world. With phones, we can order our shopping, take pictures of our loved ones, and manage our finances. Smart speakers and smart TVs entertain us.
We use IoT devices to turn our lights on, secure our homes, and control our heating. Our phones are quite possibly the most personal device of all, an extension and projection of our physical selves and identity (Lynch, 2016). We share everything with these devices: our location, our health information, our music, films and TV shows, our photos, our banking, our shopping habits - to name just a few.
To Google, we declare where we are going and what we are interested in. To X, we announce our politics. To Facebook, we report what we are doing and who we have relationships with. Our phones are not just for you. They are you.
It is hard to follow where information about you goes. The onward journey of our data is hidden among pages and pages of terms and conditions. It is referenced to in complex and euphemistic data protection agreements.
Following what happens to our data is like tracking a droplet of water as it passes through a complex system of streams, rivers, and seas. Almost uncontrollably, it travels far and wide.
Businesses, for example, are created to scrape data from other businesses' websites independently. Why does this happen? As Mikko Hyppönen wrote in If It's Smart, It's Vulnerable, "Data is power. Data is money. Data is the new oil.' Everyone wants data. In these circumstances, we should be under no illusions that controlling our droplets of data requires significant effort. Privacy has a high price.
Where our data moves to is important.
Leaked and mishandling of data has disastrous consequences. For example, in 2023, an ex-Tesla employee said Tesla staff were passing pictures and videos around the office taken from customers' cars (Reuters, 2023).
In another example, an image was posted online from a test Roomba vacuum of a woman in the restroom (Guo, 2023).
Only the most credulous would believe that our data is completely safe in the hands of private companies - and yet we continue to buy their products. The question of the security of our data is only rarely discussed in public discourse. Usually, we have these discussions only when something goes spectacularly wrong.
You can be anxious as hell about big tech having access to your data, but, in addition to big tech, it is those closer to home who perhaps would cause you worry.
Your cohabitees, your family, your roommates, and your parents have the tools to become an all-seeing eye. The cameras, some of which don't require wiring in at all, can be placed all around the house and the garden to provide a continuous injection onto your phone of things that can make you anxious.
Buy a Ring doorbell: make yourself insecure. It turns out that we did not need the watchtower of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon to ensure we are all doing exactly as we should under the threat of the omniscient authority. We can do it with networked cameras, becoming the jailers of our own family and friends.
Things that may never have mattered now become digitized for examination; the people we trust suddenly become the subjects of our mistrust. After some critical thought, products that at first glance offer value are in fact demons bringing forth a nightmare, specters benighting our dreams of individual freedom.
Is this the darkness then, that "Privacy is dead, having died on our watch" (Hyppönen, 2022)? In other words, are we letting the power of information technology overcome us and our personal boundaries? Are we failing to hold back the technological erosion of our individual freedoms?
Maybe there is only one option left open to us, namely, to come to terms with the idea that the future of privacy is not about individual control over our data. Instead, it is about who is going to take control: people, governments, or businesses.
To consider the public reaction to this situation, let us imagine the information ecosystem as a garden. The data we create are the crops and plants that make the garden what it is: a sustainable and sustaining resource.
There are three groups of people who inhabit the information ecosystem, each with their different views on the control of information. They are the gardeners, the weather vanes, and the stones.
First, the gardeners. Like those who cultivate plants and crops, this group of people want to look after the ecosystem that we all use. The gardeners decide where the plants grow, and they are sensitive to the conditions under which they are nurtured.
Conscious of the health of the ecosystem, the gardeners try to protect the crops from hazardous forces. The gardeners work actively day and night. They shelter their plants from that which leaches the Earth and eclipses the light. Their aim is to make the ecosystem sustainable for as many as possible, for as long as possible.
Second, the weather vanes. This group of people indirectly support the garden. Their attitude to the garden is largely shaped by the strongest winds, generally pointing towards whatever direction is dominant. The weather vanes may be aware of the hazards approaching the crops, the threats invading our ecosystem, but the work to protect our common resource is not for them. They do not act against the prevailing wind. The weather vanes orient themselves passively according to the hollow breath of air.
Last, the stones. Resistant to change, this group of people has settled in the garden but is generally indifferent to the ecosystem around them. Unlike the gardeners and the weather vanes, they have no interest in keeping the garden healthy and fruitful. The stones freely surrender whatever to whoever demands it, often without hesitation. They are neither active nor passive because their understanding of the ecosystem around them is limited. They inhabit the garden, but the stones slumber, uninterested in the complexities of the world around them.
Unless you live off-grid in a remote area, disconnected from the vast virtual world, you inhabit this ecosystem. You will perhaps identify with one of these groups, either the gardeners, the weather vanes, or the stones. Each group responds differently to the health and sustainability of our shared resource, the information ecosystem. Some want to do more than others to support it. Others ignore the risks to our garden altogether. As is often the case, much of the work to sustain this garden falls on too few shoulders.
Whether active, passive, or uninterested, information technology is rapidly charging beyond the loose certainties of the public about how to manage it and who should manage it.
To catch up, we must encourage the public to keep asking critical questions. Curiosity can be a key to freedom. As Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy and ethics of information at the University of Oxford argues, the Information Age necessitates a new ethical paradigm.
We must abandon outdated frameworks of thinking about our personal information that were based on life in pre-Information Age, when anonymity was more easily achieved. Floridi recommends that we should keep discussing who owns our data, how it's being used, and what this means for our privacy and autonomy.
Besides questions, privacy advocates must take a lead and strive for specific goals, like equality and individual freedom.
Advocates can nurture these concepts by growing them from the ground up, by encouraging grassroots education into matters about privacy to building advocacy communities. Advocates can engage expertly with a topic, turning their specialist knowledge to new challenges and specific cases where our privacy goes unprotected.
They should not be gatekeepers who allow or deny people's access to these discussions. Instead, they should inform and enlighten, listen to and protect the most vulnerable, and encourage understanding and conversations between different communities of people.
Activities such as these would help to transform the old discursive frameworks into something that can satisfy our needs in the 21st century. They would help make us become more resilient to the impact of information technology on our lives. Even if the distance between the two seems oceanic, our thinking can match technological advances if we illuminate the experiences that matter most.
Nevertheless, deep and dark are the rabbit holes of privacy and freedom. Diving down some of their passages, we have examined how technology has become so intertwined with everyday life and also considered the dangers of data collection.
We have proposed the "Garden of Privacy."
We hope this will help us reflect on current privacy discussions and identify the kinds of questions that we need to confront to make the benefits of the Information Age more equitable and sustainable.
However, while we strive for equity, we must also acknowledge that privacy involves hard compromises. Protecting our privacy remains a Sisyphean task. Some of our data will still be collected. Some of us will make more efforts than others.
But all of this makes it all the more important to speak up and raise questions about privacy. This is to say that we need to keep tending to our garden.
We should care for our plants and crops, help them fruit and flourish, and fertilize the ground so it will remain sustainable for us all and for generations to come.
References
If It's Smart, It's Vulnerable by Mikko Hyppönen
Leave My iPhone Alone: Why Our Smartphones are Extensions of Ourselves The Guardian (Mirror)
Tesla Workers Shared "Intimate" Car Camera Images, Ex-Employees Allege: "Massive Invasion of Privacy" The Guardian (Mirror)
A Roomba Recorded a Woman on the Toilet MIT Technology Review