In the latest issue of the MIT Technology Review, Danah Boyd (a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society) writes an opinion column discussing why privacy isn’t dead.

Privacy is not in opposition to speaking in public. We speak privately in public all the time. Sitting in a restaurant, we have intimate conversations knowing that the waitress may overhear. We count on what Erving Goffman called “civil inattention”: people will politely ignore us, and even if they listen they won’t join in, because doing so violates social norms. Of course, if a close friend sits at the neighboring table, everything changes. Whether an environment is public or not is beside the point. It’s the situation that matters.

Whenever we speak in face-to-face settings, we modify our communication on the basis of cues like who’s present and how far our voices carry. We negotiate privacy explicitly–”Please don’t tell anyone”–or through tacit understanding. Sometimes, this fails.

A friend might gossip behind our back or fail to understand what we thought was implied. Such incidents make us question our interpretation of the situation or the trustworthiness of the friend.

All this also applies online, but with additional complications. Digital walls do almost have ears; they listen, record, and share our messages. Before we can communicate appropriately in a social environment like Facebook or Twitter, we must develop a sense for how and what people share. [...]

As social media become more embedded in everyday society, the mismatch between the rule-based privacy that software offers and the subtler, intuitive ways that humans understand the concept will increasingly cause cultural collisions and social slips. But people will not abandon social media, nor will privacy disappear. They will simply work harder to carve out a space for privacy as they understand it and to maintain control, whether by using pseudonyms or speaking in code.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 and is filed under Anonymity, Identification, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Possibly related posts:

• MIT Technology Review: Private Social Network for Cell Phones
• MIT Technology Review: Privacy Plug-In Fakes out Facebook
• MIT Technology Review: Social Networks Keep Privacy in the Closet