Worried about privacy? We have hardly any left anyhow

That companies are abusing private data is unsettling. More unsettling still is that enough private data has been made public to abuse. After Cambridge Analytica was found to be exploiting the data of Facebook users, it is not quite enough to blame the company that grabbed personal information from individuals. Nor is it quite correct to blame the individuals who left it lying out in the open only for it to be grabbed. A company has harmed individuals, but it was helped along by individuals who consent to harm themselves; individuals have harmed their own interests, but they were helped along by a company that did not ensure consent was informed.

We are left, then, with little choice but to resurrect the most faithful of the oblique political denunciations that carried us through our undergraduate days: It is the fault of the culture. In a culture that urges public confessions of every kind imaginable, privacy is not merely unimportant, but morally suspect.

That is why, when Facebook asks us what is on our mind, many can be counted on to oblige it with an answer. Is this a free choice? It’s certainly a choice. It’s not entirely a free one. The urge to share much of one’s information with much of the world appears increasingly socially pathological, creepily reminiscent of what some political theorists, undergraduate and otherwise, refer to as the culture of confession. By confession, we are not speaking here of the discreetly liberating act of offering honesty and amends to an injured party or trusted confidant. We mean the compulsive handing over of one’s thoughts, photographs, romantic

Why are even some of us relinquishing even something?

history and precise real-time whereabouts to anyone online, which is to say to practically everyone alive.

With little regard for which nefarious actors care to receive our information, an incomprehensibly large number of us care to offer it. That we can say “nefarious actors” in the same breath as “ceding all our personal information en masse” ought to tell us that something has gone wrong — not merely in our corporate practices, not merely in our government regulations, not merely in our individual psyches, but in our culture.

Now, what some people call wrong, others call evolution; what some call ceding, others call sharing. “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information — and different kinds — but more openly with more people. And that social norm is just something that’s evolved over time.” So says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he also says.

His defence against the charge that his company violates our privacy rights rests on our complicity in the violation, which happily for him renders it no violation at all. He neglects to mention that Facebook profiles non-users as well as users, has allowed people to relinquish their friends’ data as well as their own, and has an alarming capacity to infer information that wasn’t wittingly supplied about, for instance, sexual orientation and mental health.

But still: Why are even some of us relinquishing even something ? Just as censorship doesn’t only involve being jailed for speaking or physically prevented from doing so, a public confession need not be forced for it to be given under extreme duress.

There are heavy professional and social costs to being offline. And we are not only punished for failing to tell all or at least some, but rewarded for doing so: if not awarded jobs for having a respectable profile, then at least promised an improved social standing.

If that comes at the cost of our privacy, we can comfort ourselves in the knowledge that we have so little left, we’ll hardly miss it.

Shannon Gormley is an Ottawa Citizen global affairs columnist and freelance journalist.