In the Future, We Will Be More Concerned With Issues of Privacy and Data Ownership

The headline above is a quote from Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, who was interviewed last year for a wonderful article in the New York Times called Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. Considering how participation in social media has altered how individuals separate their private and public lives, Tufekci's comments make me wonder whether such a delineation is even possible anymore. I thought of this recently when a friend posted several photographs to Facebook and tagged me in them. I wasn't thrilled by this, because I would never have uploaded these photos on my own and now they were visible to a combined list exceeding 500 people! It's not that there was anything particularly bad going on- they were taken among friends at a restaurant- it's just that they were lousy images and not flattering to anyone pictured. I consider the tagging part simply bad online etiquette, but am still bothered by the picture existing online at all. Perhaps this is an issue of my own vanity; nevertheless, I now have to consider whether I might appear in someone's photos that they share online and accept the fact that it's totally out of my control. At least I can tweak my own account privacy settings to control what I share and who I share it with.

This and other minor issues are no doubt on all our minds as we navigate new social terrain online, but what happens when these issues get really serious?

Concern about online privacy is certainly not new, and if you're at all like me, each time any controversy arises, the feeling that you have nothing to hide overrides any initiative to really consider the issue fully. But looking at this issue in terms of "having nothing to hide" assumes that if any issue came up, you'd be protected somehow. Brad Templeton, the chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, spoke on this point at the 2009 BIL Conference in a presentation titled "The Evils of Cloud Computing." In the following quote, Templeton speaks about how the Fourth Amendment protects your privacy, and how it doesn't:

"One of the things that I am concerned about is erasing the Fourth Amendment. For those who do not know, the Fourth Amendment is the line in the Bill of Rights that mostly relates to privacy. It says that you have the right be secure in your person, papers and effects, and people need a warrant to search your house or search your papers. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court and other courts of the United States have ruled that this wonderful Fourth Amendment does not apply when data is in the hands of third parties.

When you have something on the computer in your house, it is protected by the Fourth Amendment. If you put something on a computer owned by Facebook, it is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. It is only protected in some cases—email has a law that protects email and medical data has a law that protects medical data, and there are laws governing banking records. Specific laws protect certain types of data, but by changing the way we do computing so that all of our data is stored in the cloud we are effectively moving all of our personal data out of our houses and into big data warehouses, and we are erasing a line from the Bill of Rights.We may decide that we want to do that, but I want to make sure that we do not do it casually."

The choice to put data in "the cloud" is not an inherently bad one; as Templeton points out, we may end up making that choice in the end. However, if we do, it absolutely needs to be a choice that is thoroughly considered and that everyone is aware of. The idea that we might glibly be making critical decisions seems unlikely to us in the present, yet it's a reality that anyone looking at history in retrospect can appreciate. Recently, a reader named Richard made the following comment on a blog post I wrote about privacy and copyright issues around Google services that profoundly nails the point:

"I think these privacy issues really snuck up on people. We all got used to email, probably with a false sense of privacy. But services like Gmail just make the lack of privacy with email more plain. When you sent an email using AOL or some other service, it was easy to overlook the fact that your words were being passed through many servers and could easily be seen by other people (assuming people cared enough to hack it). Now, seeing ads along side your email makes it much more obvious that your email is not as much 'yours' as you thought."

Richard gets it: We enthusiastically chose to start sharing our data across networks by using webmail services like AOL, Yahoo, and Gmail, but it wasn't until advertisements related to the content of our emails started showing up on the right of our pages that it really became plain that our messages were being read. Even if it's just a robot reading them, they are being read- the robot is just a proxy for a person. Imagine if you came home one day and found a robot standing in your hall, reading a letter that had been delivered to your address. You'd be shocked, frightened, and angry, partly because of the robot intruder, but also because it would stand to reason that the robot was reading your letter on behalf of someone else. Though this may be an unlikely scenario, it highlights the need to determine when our information is public and when it is private.

Here's a more down-to-earth scenario that highlights our inconsistency in the matter: Recently, it took a California court to rule that you can't simply claim "invasion of privacy" when people circulate what you've posted to your MySpace page, even if it's incriminating. This sets a precedent that we can't expect protection over the data we willingly share online. When I see stories like this, I think, why on Earth would anyone even think that what is posted on a social network profile is private? A social network profile is intended to be seen by people! But in fairness, issues of privacy are not so cut and dry, and as pointed out by Richard, have almost "snuck up" on us as we naively explored shiny new social network toys online. Clearly, we're going to have quite a bit of sorting out to do, both in and out of the courts.

Much of the above discussion is predicated on the assumption that you own any data you share about yourself online. But is this really true? There are many indicators that suggest that, despite any conviction you may have on the matter, many companies consider data posted to their networks about you their property.

Stop for a moment to consider how much content you create that actually exists on another company's server, rather than one you control: Every email you send or receive if you use platforms like Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail, every event you schedule on Google Calendar, every post you share or comment on in Google Reader, every document you create with or upload to Google Docs, every image you upload to Picasa or Flickr, every video you create or upload to YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, or Facebook, every wall post, comment, message, group or page you create in Facebook, every tweet on Twitter... believe me, I could go on. For me, except for the content I write for the Newfangled blog and newsletters, much of what I do is on another company's platform, and it's a daunting amount! Who owns all this stuff? It seems reasonable to assume that I do if I create it, especially emails or documents, but I'm not certain that's true, nor am I sure if anyone is.

In the meantime, little issues are popping up here and there that should give you pause. For example, did you know that Twitter restricts data retrieval to the last 3,200 updates a user has entered? Any "tweets" older than that are no longer available to you, yet it seems reasonable to assume that they still exists somewhere. Also, there was a bit of controversy this week when Facebook users realized that their pictures could potentially be used for advertising within the network. While this is indicated by the terms of service agreement that anyone signing up must first agree to, it shows that most people don't actually read these policies in full before agreeing to them. So what happens if you delete a picture from your Facebook page? It seems reasonable to assume that it gets fully deleted, but there's no real guarantee of that. Indeed, if a third-party is using it for advertising, it could have been copied at that point to their servers, too. Do you see a trend here? I keep saying, "It seems reasonable to assume." Perhaps, it is, but that's a bit ambiguous for legal precedent.

In a recent cover article titled Do You Own Facebook? Or Does Facebook Own You?, New York Magazine contributing editor Vanessa Grigoriadis examined the ins and outs of privacy and copyright concerns specifically related to content that uploaded by users to the social network's website. She points out that, aside from the individual question of ownership of particular content, extracting one's self and one's content from such a vast network as Facebook might be unrealistic in general:

"...the issue was more a matter of a kind of pre-rational emotion than any legalistic parsing of rights. What people put up on Facebook was themselves: their personhood, their social worlds, what makes them distinctive and singular... I’m not sure that we can take ourselves out once we’ve put ourselves on there. We have changed the nature of the graph by our very presence, which facilitates connections between our disparate groups of friends, who now know each other. 'If you leave Facebook, you can remove data objects, like photographs, but it’s a complete impossibility that you can control all of your data,' says Fred Stutzman, a teaching fellow studying social networks at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 'Facebook can’t promise it, and no one can promise it. You can’t remove yourself from the site because the site has, essentially, been shaped by you.'"

I wish I had more concrete answers to provide here, but the simple truth is I don't. Most legal issues are decided by precedent-establishing cases, so until enough of them are processed by the courts, I don't think we're going to have a very robust or comprehensive legal privacy policy pertaining to online behavior or content. In the meantime, it is imperative that we at least thoroughly consider what we do online, bearing these privacy issues in mind.