Summary

“Any model of privacy that focuses on the control of information will fail. Even achieving true control is nearly impossible because control presumes many things that are often untenable. Control assumes that people have agency, or the power to assert control within a particular situation. Control assumes that people have the knowledge and skills to truly control information. And control assumes that people understand the situation well enough to make informed decisions about what should be shared to whom and when. Furthermore, in a networked age, a reasonable amount of control is not enough; control has to be absolute control. One slip-up or data leakage and whatever was once protected can easily enter into a networked public where it may enter broader databases, be aggregated with other data, and circulate. In a networked world, data is more persistent, replicable, searchable, and scalable than ever before. Trying to achieve perfect control will only lead to frustration.

If we cannot rely on control to achieve privacy in a networked age, how then can we think about networked privacy? Focusing on articulated lists of relevant actors and trying to obtain rights from affected persons is bound to fail. There’s no way that consent from my not-yet-alive grandchildren is possible. This suggests that focusing on permission at the data acquisition level is not going to be viable.

We need to understand privacy in context (Nissenbaum 2009).” (http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/networked/networked)

Networked Privacy

Summary

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