CNet: Privacy is over. Here comes sociality.
CNet has an interesting column about privacy in the age of social-networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.
Throughout their historical mutations, the public and private spheres needed one another like yin and yang. Having a life was a private act, but only if it was publicly earned and respected. This dialectic relationship will always remain. There is no privacy without publicy and vice versa. And yet, while privacy may never go away as a philosophical counterweight to publicy, today it is publicy that counts as the new privilege of the digital upper class. Privacy has been marginalized to the fringes of a society whose modus operandi is based on the very public mechanisms of social sharing. In the digital era, a private life does not exist. Google ergo sum.
The search engine’s recent public stance against the Chinese government, threatening to shut down all its China operations after Gmail accounts of Chinese activists had been hacked, highlights this new power structure and the evolving value of privacy in our ever-connected world. When the privacy of Google’s users was violated, the company decided to respond with a public statement, mounting public pressure to press on an essentially private matter. Good for a company that does not want be evil, many people applauded, but it bore a certain irony that Google acted as de facto digital state with its own foreign policy. Isn’t Google, after all, built on the very principle of making private data public? Isn’t it because of Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” that we have come to terms with the fact that our online lives and afterlives will never be private again and will be perpetually archived in the very public cloud?
In the case of Google vs. China, what was bemoaned as the loss of privacy was in fact the lack of publicy. Privacy is the most precious asset in more or less closed societies in which trust is a scarce resource and true publics don’t exist. But as we live our lives in the openness of the web, isn’t it publicy that we need to enable and protect? An ideal publicy that is so transparent and democratic that it doesn’t need privacy as refuge?
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