Privacy and Republicanism
Why we should think about surveillance practices in terms of non-domination
Machteld van der Lecq (10534334)
University of Amsterdam Thesis RMA Philosophy
Supervisor: Dr. Gijs van Donselaar (Gerrit Schaafsma) Second Reader: Dr. James Gledhill
Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to provide a republican interpretation of the value of a right to privacy and to show how we can use republican means to make sense of the harms posed by emerging corporate surveillance practices by large tech companies like Google and Facebook. It is argued that the classical liberal understanding of freedom as non-interference is insufficient to make sense of the way in which these surveillance practices affect our overall freedom and that we need to start thinking in terms of non-domination. Since tech companies make use of covert surveillance techniques and track or even manipulate users’ behaviour without their consent or awareness, it is difficult to argue in what way freedom as non-interference is being threatened by these techniques. The republican concept of domination, on the other hand, exposes the detrimental effects of ubiquitous mass surveillance.
In order to defend these claims, the need for a context-based conception of the value of privacy is firstly explained, which shows why a privative interpretation of the value of privacy is insufficient under modern conditions. Secondly, the current context of surveillance capitalism and its dangerous implications for freedom are discussed. Thirdly, it is argued that the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination has the means to expose the dangers of corporate surveillance practices, while the liberal ideal of freedom as non-interference does not. Fourthly, the means of power possessed by tech firms are discussed, in order to find out how these can be challenged. The thesis is concluded by a republican proposal to protect privacy in our digital age.
Table of contents
1. The public/private distinction 7
1.1 Public, private and social 7
1.2 Liberal and republican interpretations 10
1.3 The value of privacy 12
1.4 Conclusion 15
2. Privacy in contemporary context 16
2.1 Surveillance capitalism 16
2.2 The informational panopticon 22
3. A republican account of freedom 26
3.1 A third concept of liberty 26
3.2 Freedom as non-domination 28
3.3 Republicanism and the value of privacy 33
4. Future politics 39
4.1 The power of technology 39
4.2 Digital as political 43
4.3 Republicanism in a digital age 47
5. Conclusion 53
Introduction
In 2007, Google launched a technology called ‘Google Street View’. This service offers users the opportunity to discover the planet from behind their desk by providing panoramic pictures of streets, cities and rural areas all over the world. These pictures are usually taken by a car driving around the different areas, making sure to capture every detail using 360-degree cameras. Three years later, the German Federal Commission for Data Protection announced that Google Street View was, in fact, a way of secretly collecting enormous amounts of data. Google’s Street View cars had surreptitiously been collecting data via unencrypted Wi-Fi transmissions, through which they acquired “names, telephone numbers, credit information, passwords, messages, e-mails, and chat transcripts, as well as records of online dating, pornography, browsing behaviour, medical information, location data, photos, and video and audio files” (Zuboff 2018, 144). All of this happened without anyone’s permission or awareness. At the time, Google argued that these privacy violations were a mistake, but judging by the course of action Google has taken subsequently, the company deliberately violates our privacy constantly in order to increase their revenues, amongst other things.
The Street View scandal damaged Google’s reputation, but it has not stopped us from using the company’s services. On the contrary, Google’s profits have soared in the last decade. For example, Google Search is still the most popular search engine in the world, and Google Maps remains one of the most frequently used online maps. Unfortunately, Google is only one of many companies that are publicly known to collect data in secret ways and that seem to get away with it every time: today we are surrounded by surveillance technologies and there does not seem to be a way to get out. Due to this powerlessness, we collectively seem to stick our heads in the sand, and come up with phrases like “I have nothing to hide” or we trust in the benevolence of these companies to justify what we witness when looking around us every once in a while.
One of the reasons that tech firms like Google seem to get away with it all is that corporate surveillance practices are a recent development, which means that we are still learning about the actual dangers and extent of these activities. Another reason is that the classical liberal perspective on privacy, 1
which informs many of our political and legal practices (and still shapes our intuitive views on privacy), makes it difficult to expose and articulate the dangers of the mass covert surveillance practices to which we are subject. Classical liberalism does not seem to offer an answer to the problems caused by modern surveillance practices, because the liberal understanding of freedom as non-interference does not
1 The classical liberal view is considered here to comprise ideas about freedom in the tradition of John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, et al.
sufficiently capture the dangers of these practices. The republican understanding of freedom as non-domination, on the other hand, does have the means to do so. The aim of this thesis is therefore to provide a republican interpretation of the value of a right to privacy and to show how we can use republican means to make sense of the harms posed by emerging surveillance technologies.
In order to make this clear, I will briefly consider some of the shortcomings of classical liberalism regarding privacy, and will show how republicanism helps to overcome these. The classical liberal understanding of freedom as non-interference amounts to a negative conception of liberty, which means that one is considered free as long as there are no external social and political constraints on behaviour (Mokrosinska 2017, 120). From this view follows an interpretation of the function of privacy that is limited mainly to the protection of individual autonomy. Since the classical liberal view has this narrow scope and focuses on the threat of acquiring specific information about specific individuals, several aspects of modern mass surveillance practices remain absent in the discussion about a right to privacy. First of all, modern indiscriminate mass surveillance technologies have an unprecedented scale and do not only affect certain individuals. This difference in scale could matter because while it might be morally unproblematic to collect some information about a few people, it can be problematic to gather data about everyone all the time (Stahl 2016, 33).
The second aspect is that indiscriminate surveillance technologies, together with advances in computing, make it possible to obtain and analyse large amounts of information for purposes not related to targeting individuals, but rather classes, or groups of people. This means that a lot of information is being gathered, but since not all of it will be used, this practice does not lead to direct interference with individuals. Due to this, the liberal account of negative freedom makes it complicated to argue that surveillance practices are intrinsically harmful, even when the information that is obtained is not used for illegitimate purposes (Stahl 2016, 34).
Lastly, given the scope of modern corporate surveillance, there is a growing danger that its power can have serious political implications for citizens. The symbiotic relationship between the government and many large tech companies could (and arguably already does ,) pose a threat to2 democratic will-formation by shaping the space of agency that is available to citizens, and thereby the reasons that could lead them to political action (Stahl 2016, 36). This means that certain types of relationships become impossible or unavailable, for example, a meeting between citizens to discuss certain political issues. The citizens attending this meeting will speak less freely when they are aware that they are being watched by authorities, which will fundamentally change the nature of those
2 See for example the effect of targeted social media advertising in the 2016 UK Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election (Rosenberg, Confessore and Cadwalladr, 2018) [Date Accessed: July 3, 2019].
meetings. Surveillance could also shape the way politicians speak to different audiences, leading to a fracturing of the public sphere which makes authentic democratic deliberation difficult, if not impossible.
The narrow focus of the classical liberal view induces two main problems when it comes to a right to privacy. Firstly, most liberal accounts adopt a privative conception of privacy, which means that the right to privacy is defined in terms of a retreat from the public sphere. Because of this, the harm caused by surveillance is underestimated (Stahl 2016, 34). Secondly, the liberal right to privacy traditionally focuses on control over who has access to our lives and on keeping others from interfering with our choices. However, this argument does not hold when the agent is not directly being interfered with at all, or is not even aware that she is being tracked. This means that when surveillance practices are appropriately constrained, the liberal view does not provide us with arguments which show that there is anything intrinsically wrong about such practices (Stahl 2016, 34). While liberals will agree that privacy is valuable they will find it difficult to explain exactly how modern mass surveillance techniques harm us, or to offer proposals about how to regulate these technologies.
The republican account of freedom as non-domination, on the other hand, does offer a coherent explanation for why a loss of privacy is harmful in these cases by arguing that privacy protects us from domination instead of interference. This offers more compelling grounds for constructing an argument against surveillance because domination occurs when someone merely has the option to arbitrarily interfere with someone else’s options, whether they exert it or not (Pettit 1997a, vii-viii). Based on the idea of freedom as non-domination, the republican tradition provides a basis for arguing that an uncontrolled loss of privacy and unwanted disclosure of private information to others always means that dominating power is acquired, regardless of the motivations or dispositions of those who have access to our personal information. Awareness of one’s dependence on the arbitrary will of others is not a necessary condition for domination, but the simple fact that one is dependent already diminishes one’s freedom (Roberts 2015, 334-335). This means that on the republican account, the mere potential of interference is enough for freedom to be under threat.
The difference between the liberal and republican conception of freedom here is thus that while liberals are generally concerned about the effect that a loss of privacy will have on the autonomy of the subject, the republican focus is on the unchecked inequality in power that is created by such a loss. I will argue that the mass surveillance to which we are subject on a continuous basis creates exactly this type of inequality which is of concern to republican theorists. Throughout the following chapters I will try to show that republican theory identifies the threat to liberty posed by mass surveillance and provides tools for thinking about how it may best be regulated.
The thesis is structured in the following way: In chapter one I begin by discussing varying interpretations public/private distinction and how the liberal and republican accounts differ with regards to the importance of privacy. In chapter two, I discuss the extent of modern surveillance practices by private tech firms, and formulate an account of privacy that allows for understanding the problems caused by these activities. Next, in chapter three, I present the republican account of freedom and show what a republican interpretation of the value of a right to privacy entails. In chapter four, I conclude with a characterization of the power of tech firms and a proposal of how to use republican means to transform this power into something more legitimate.
The main focus of this thesis will be on the use of surveillance practices by private companies because this has become the most prevalent type of surveillance that individuals in the western hemisphere encounter on a daily basis, and the implications of this should, therefore, be further investigated. However, the extent of state surveillance should be mentioned briefly. Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about PRISM - a government surveillance programme developed by the United States of America - have shown us that personal data acquired by private companies are being used by government authorities as well , which has dangerous implications for our freedom due to the rise of3 surveillance as control. Another example of the expansion of state surveillance is the Chinese government experimenting with the implementation of a ‘Social Credit System’ in China, which provides citizens with a public social score based on behaviour in order to keep them in line and to “promote trustworthiness” among Chinese people. These developments will not be further explored, but are4
meant to illustrate the worldwide impact and extent of the use of surveillance techniques, and to show the broader context in which surveillance by private companies is taking place.
3 See Remie and Zantingh (2013) [Date Accessed: June 13, 2019].
1.
The public/private distinction
The classical origin of the distinction between a public and a private realm is to be found in Aristotle’s Politica,
in which he described the public sphere as the locus of political life, and the private sphere as the realm of the household and family. Hannah Arendt uses Aristotle’s distinction in her work The Human Condition
(1958) and adds a third sphere: the social. In this chapter, which will serve as a background for later discussion, Arendt’s interpretation of Aristotle and her tripartite division will be discussed in order to reveal the dangers of the modern rise of the social sphere. Thereafter, the difference between the liberal and republican interpretation of the public sphere will be addressed by referring to two corresponding conceptions of the political derived from antiquity.1.1 Public, private and social
According to Aristotle, true freedom meant complete independence of the necessities of life and the relationships that follow from these. This is what his ‘bios politikos’ amounts to: a life devoted to public-political matters. The two other ways of life that Aristotle thought could be chosen in freedom are the life of enjoying bodily pleasures, in which the beautiful is consumed; and the life of the philosopher, which is devoted to the contemplation of eternal things.
Hannah Arendt follows Aristotle’s ideas about freedom when discussing the ancient view on the public/private distinction in her work The Human Condition
(1958). She describes the private sphere of the ancients as characterized by necessity, inequality and the fulfilment of human needs for the survival of the individual. The realm of the polis, on the other hand, is pointed out as the realm of freedom, in which equals discussed only those matters that were considered relevant for the polis as a whole (Arendt 1958, 30). The reason for this equality amongst actors in the public sphere was that it was thought that in order to be free, one should not be ruled nor be a ruler oneself. Equality in this sense had nothing to do with justice in the way it is considered valuable in modern times, but was the essential part of freedom in the sense of only having to deal with equals. This position was only possible as a consequence of the presupposed existence of unequals, and therefore freedom from the necessities of life was facilitated by the activities taking place in the private sphere, in which slaves, women and the rest of the family took care of the daily concerns (Arendt 1958, 32-33).After her characterization of the ancient view, Arendt considers the transformation of the private/public distinction from antiquity to modernity. A key element of this discussion is her conception of the ‘vita activa’, which she considers to be as old as Aristotle’s bios politikos (Arendt 1958, 12). She describes the vita activa as consisting of the following three human activities: labour, work and action.
These three activities are each connected to a specific conditioning factor of human life (Arendt 1958, 7). The first activity, labour, entails the biological processes of the human body, and corresponds with the human condition of life itself. Work, the second activity, is described as related to the non-natural aspect of human existence, which consists of the world of objects created by human beings. This mode of life is connected to the condition of being in the world.
The last and third activity is action and is considered as the only activity which takes place directly between human beings, and not through things or matter. Action makes possible every way of political life and is connected to the human condition of plurality (Arendt 1958, 7-8). Arendt argues that all human activities are conditioned by the fact that human beings live together, but that only action cannot exist outside of human society. She explains it in the following way: “Action alone is the exclusive prerogative of man; neither a beast nor a god is capable of it, and only action is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others” (Arendt 1958, 22-23). From this follows that human freedom can only be attained through action, by which people distinguish themselves from other animals.
As soon as the ancient city-state disappeared, the vita activa lost its political meaning and subsequently started to denote all kinds of active engagement in the things of this world (Arendt 1958, 14). As a consequence, action descended to the same level of the hierarchy of human activities as the formerly inferior activities of labour and work. The reason for this transformation, argues Arendt, is the rise of a third realm, one which is different from both the public and the private as described by Aristotle. Arendt calls this the social sphere, and defines it as follows: “Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public” (Arendt 1958, 46). From this follows that the social sphere threatens the possibility of attaining freedom in action in the public sphere.
She points out that the political meaning of the term ‘social’ is derived from the Latin terms ‘socialis’ and ‘socius’, meaning ‘allied’ and ‘friend’, and did not have an equivalent in Greek language or thought. According to Arendt, the reason for the absence of a Greek conception of the social is not that the Greeks were unaware of humans' need for a society, but rather that they considered the condition of plurality as a limitation imposed on us by biological necessity rather than something characteristic for the human animal, like the Romans did (Arendt 1958, 23-24). The fact that humans need to live together was thus considered as a burden, rather than what should be the main focus of political life. Therefore, as discussed above, the Greeks thought of the public sphere as standing in direct opposition to the private sphere of the home and the family, and not of the social sphere as fulfilling this role. This means that for the Greeks, participation in political life demanded more than merely living together and
determining the best way of doing so. Since the Roman conception of society did have a clear political meaning, namely that of an “alliance between different people for a specific purpose,” Arendt thinks that the Romans misunderstood the Greek notion ‘political’ as ‘social’ (Arendt 1958, 23; 27).
This equation of the social and the political realm became even more confusing in the modern understanding of society. She explains this in the following way:
The distinction between a private and a public sphere of life corresponds to the household and the political realms, which have existed as distinct, separate entities at least since the rise of the ancient city-state; but the emergence of the social realm, which is neither private not public, strictly speaking, is a relatively new phenomenon whose origin coincided with the emergence of the modern age and which found its political form in the nation-state (Arendt 1958, 28).
In modern times, Arendt argues, the lines between the different societal spheres are fundamentally blurred, as will be further discussed throughout this thesis. Political life has lost its original meaning of freedom in action and has become a way of protecting a certain type of society, which Arendt calls the “functionalization” of politics (Arendt 1958, 33). The public sphere is therefore no longer a place from which all that is necessary is excluded, but is now characterized by matters that used to belong to the private sphere, like economic activities and housekeeping.
Arendt argues that the rise of the social has strongly changed the meaning of both ‘public’ and ‘private’ (Arendt 1958, 38). This can be illustrated by her discussion of the detrimental effect of modern society to the public sphere. One of the meanings of the public is that of a shared world, which rests on a condition of permanence. With this, Arendt means that we do not only share the world with everyone who lives in it at this moment, but also with the ones who were there before us and those who will come after us. (Arendt 1958, 55-56). In modern times the public realm has lost this sense of permanence because the public is now characterized by subjectivity and the more or less urgent character of private needs. According to Arendt, something as concrete and enduring as a common world cannot be established under these conditions, which makes human freedom in action impossible (Arendt 1958, 56).
She proceeds by discussing the changed meaning of privacy. In ancient times ‘private’ literally meant ‘being deprived’ of something, namely the capacity of freedom. Privacy in the modern world has lost this meaning, which is a consequence of the expansion of the private sphere through a process of individualism (Arendt 1958, 38). The main function of modern privacy, thus, became to protect what is intimate, which turned it into the opposite of the social realm instead of the political. From this follows
that according to Arendt, the modern private sphere has expanded due to the rise of the social because the individuality and excellence formerly belonging to the public sphere are now considered as private matters.
However, Arendt points out that the rise of the social also poses a threat to the private sphere. In order to make this point, she discusses the following two non-privative aspects of private life: the private possessions we use and consume daily, which we need more urgently than anything in the public realm; and private property as a shelter from the public (Arendt 1958, 71). This can be illustrated by discussing an important non-privative function of private property in ancient times that has not yet been mentioned, namely that in order to be admitted to the public space and to be protected by the law, the possession of private property was required. Citizenship thus depended on private property, and therefore no privacy meant the loss of one’s humanity due to the impossibility to achieve freedom by partaking in political life (Arendt 1958, 64).
In modern times, privacy has lost this ‘sacred’ meaning, because the political sphere has been taken over by the social. As stated above, the political sphere now denotes the protection of private interests, which means that the private sphere in the sense of the possession of private property seems to have lost its function of guarding one’s humanity. However, when we stop taking seriously the question of private property, we risk losing the second non-privative function of the private sphere: a shelter from the public. This shelter is necessary in order to protect us from the intrusive gaze of the public and to give our lives meaning. As Arendt puts it: “a life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow” (Arendt 1958, 71).
1.2 Liberal and republican interpretations
In order to understand the effects that modern surveillance practices might have on our freedom we have to find a way to rethink the meaning of the terms ‘private’ and ‘public’. As the discussion of Arendt makes clear, the distinction between the private and public is fundamentally unclear and their relation ambiguous, especially under modern conditions. Therefore, to be able to make sense of the public/private distinction, different discourses in which this is being described should be considered in order to find out what is precisely at stake. An author that offers a way to do this is Jeff Weintraub, who argues that the public/private distinction is “not unitary, but protean” (Weintraub 1997, 2). Doing so, he describes two basic ways in which ‘private’ and ‘public’ are contrasted in different frameworks: firstly, “what is hidden or withdrawn versus what is open, revealed, or accessible”, and secondly, “what is individual, or pertains only to an individual, versus what is collective, or affects the interests of a
collectivity of individuals” (Weintraub 1997, 4-5). In short, he calls these the underlying criteria of “visibility” and “collectivity”.
Weintraub categorizes the different ways in which the public/private distinction is being made in current discussion under several headings, of which the “liberal-economistic model” and the “republican-virtue (and classical) approach” are relevant for present purposes (Weintraub 1997, 7). The first considers the public/private distinction mainly in terms of the contrast between state administration and the market economy and is dominant in everyday political and legal discussions. This model describes public/private issues as being concerned with striking a balance between individuals and non-governmental organizations on the one hand, and the state on the other (Weintraub 1997, 8).
The second approach defines the public realm in terms of citizenship and political community instead and considers active participation in collective decision-making as being at the heart of public life, which is characterized by solidarity and equality (Weintraub 1997, 7; 10). Both the liberal and the republican perspective define the public as political, but they do so in different ways. While the public or political in the liberal view is understood as the administrative state, the republican model interprets the political as an active mode of collective decision-making and action, as captured by Arendt’s idea of the public sphere (Weintraub 1997, 11).
Weintraub connects these different interpretations of the public as political to two basic models derived from antiquity, which can be related to Arendt’s discussion on the difference between the Greek and Roman conception of the political. The first model is that of the republic or self-governing polis, in which the political is understood as citizenship and active participation in an ongoing process of collective self-determination (Weintraub 1997, 11). The second model is the Roman empire and its central notion of sovereignty. This is a more passive interpretation of the political, according to which individual citizens are granted rights which are then guaranteed by the sovereign. (Weintraub 1997, 11) According to Weintraub, many of the ambiguities about the function of the political today stem from the influence of both these models on modern thought (Weintraub 1997, 12). These different conceptions of the political lead to divergent ideas about privacy as well, since the terms ‘private’ and ‘public’ are interrelated and only make sense as elements of a paired opposition (Weintraub 1997, 2). For example, while the Greeks considered the private sphere to be characterized by necessity, it seems that according to the Roman view the private sphere comprised the aspects of life over which the state had no control. An important aspect of Weintraub’s and Arendt’s discussion is that both point out that the distinction between a public and a private sphere is not clear cut. The public sphere cannot simply be reduced to the administrative state or political participation, just as the private sphere does not merely consist of the parts of life that are out of the reach of state control (Weintraub 1997, 15). Arendt’s
tripartite division shows us that the rise of modern society has led to a change in our conception of the public and private sphere, and that this transformation has made it impossible to attain freedom in action. Both the criteria of visibility and collectivity as mentioned by Weintraub are at stake today, firstly because the possibility of a private hiding space from the public is being threatened by the social, and secondly because the consequence of the functionalization of politics is that freedom has to be searched for in the social instead of the public realm.
Throughout the following chapters, the implications of the violation of the visibility criterium and the ways in which this threatens the private sphere under modern conditions will be addressed extensively. Since the public/private distinction is not a binary one and the interpretation of the different spheres is largely subject to societal circumstances, the context provided by modern conditions should be investigated in order to find a conception of privacy that suits today’s demands. Before doing so in the next chapter, I will first provide a more elaborate justification of a context-based conception of privacy.
1.3 The value of privacy
In the introduction, I argued that classical liberals have a narrow understanding of privacy and that this causes problems when trying to make sense of the dangers posed by modern surveillance practices. Similarly, Daniel Solove argues that “[p]rivacy is not one thing, but a plurality of many distinct yet related things” (Solove 2009, 74). He describes privacy as a culturally and historically contingent phenomenon, which entails that what is private is not inherent to a specific matter or situation, but rather context-related. In order to illustrate this, he gives the example of changed norms considering nudity and concealing bodily functions from ancient Greece and Rome to modern times: in ancient times, it was common to exercise together naked and to bath in the presence of others, while today it is generally accepted that these things belong to the private sphere (Solove 2009, 76).
According to Solove, expectations about privacy in a certain society are determined by what peopledesire
to be private, not by what theyexpect
to be private. He describes this as follows: “Privacy is something we construct through norms and the law. Thus we call upon the law to protect privacy because
we experience a lack of privacy and desire to rectify that situation, not because we already expect privacy” (emphasis in the original, Solove 2009, 76). Therefore, Solove thinks that the problems creating a desire for privacy should be at the heart of a theory of privacy. These problems arise when people's activities are disrupted by activities of governments, businesses, organizations, and other people (Solove 2009, 76). He argues that when one sticks to a specific and rigid conception of privacy, prevailing issues tend to get ignored because they do not fit within the boundaries of this conception.When privacy is framed in individualistic terms, as is the case with the classical liberal tradition, this usually means that privacy concerns get trumped when conflicts arise with the common good. Privacy considered as an individual right is often in conflict with more collective concerns like freedom of speech and national security, which entails that the former has to make way for the latter (Solove 2009, 78). Therefore, privacy should be considered as having social value rather than as merely an individual right. This means that privacy issues should not be regarded as individual problems but as something that is affecting everyone and that privacy should be protected by society instead of pitted against it (Solove 2009, 79).
It follows that, as Arendt also argued, privacy does not only have a privative function. Solove describes this as follows: “Privacy is not simply a way to extricate individuals from social control, as it is itself a form of social control that emerges from the norms and values of society” (Solove 2009, 79-80). These norms and values are constructed by the conditions in which people find themselves and the problems with which they are faced. Whenever a conception of privacy is being constructed, it should be based on this social value rather than on a rigid abstract value, and be adapted along the lines of society’s demands.
One of the privacy-related problems we are faced with today is the proliferation of surveillance practices by private (tech) companies. An obvious example of a company applying these techniques is social media platform Facebook, infamous for its constant breaking of promises regarding the protection of privacy rights. To illustrate the urgent need for an understanding of privacy that meets modern5 demands, Facebook’s attitude towards privacy (as evidenced by its recent actions and official statements) will be briefly discussed before the problem of surveillance is addressed.
At the end of May 2019, Facebook’s lawyers officially stated in court that users of the social media platform they represented do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. This happened 6
during litigation stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal late 2018, which revealed that the voter-profiling company had gathered the personal data of millions of Facebook users without consent and had used this information for political advertising purposes. Amongst other things, Cambridge7
Analytica and Facebook are said to have been used by external parties to influence the results of the 2016 Brexit referendum, and of the United States’ presidential elections that same year. During this litigation, Facebook’s lawyers stated that sharing messages or pictures on Facebook with hundreds of friends means the negation of any reasonable expectation of privacy since this entails “an affirmative
5 See Srinivasan (2019) [Date Accessed: June 26, 2019]. 6 See Warzel (2019) [Date Accessed: June 26, 2019].
social act to publish, to disclose, to share ostensibly private information with a hundred people”. One of the lawyers stated that sharing anything with anyone inevitably means a negation of privacy.
As became clear from the discussion so far, such a binary conception of privacy has nothing to do with what today’s desire for privacy is about. Current circumstances require a far more nuanced view of privacy than Facebook’s idea that it is something you either have or do not have. The company’s conception of privacy strongly resembles Arendt’s depiction of the ancient conception of the public or political sphere: the site of exposure and visibility as opposed to the shelter and anonymity that characterized the private sphere. However, the purpose of this exposure was to prove your individual value among the presence of equals and to discuss only things that are relevant for the public cause (Arendt 1958, 35; 51-25). Logging on to Facebook and sharing what a great time you just had with your friends does not meet the demands of the ancient public sphere, and therefore the corresponding ancient conception of privacy is not applicable to this situation either. Facebook users are not exclusively concerned with serving a political purpose by discussing only those affairs that are relevant for the public cause, and do not deliberately decide to forfeit their privacy to enter the public sphere and prove their value to the rest of the world. Of course, sometimes people like to start a discussion on Facebook and use it to be politically active, but this is just one of the many purposes the platform serves.
Another way in which the ancient public sphere and the online public sphere are incomparable is the presence of equals mentioned above. Due to surveillance practices carried out in a secretive manner, Facebook knows more about users than they themselves are aware of. As a consequence, a power imbalance exists between the company and its users, which culminates in the company’s new-found possibility to exercise control over the behaviour of its users. For instance, recent research concerning Facebook data points out that personality judgments by computers are more accurate than those made by humans. In this research, the aim was for both humans and computers to predict users’8 personalities by looking at their Facebook likes. It turned out that computer models were better capable to accurately predict users’ personalities than family and close friends, and just as capable as their spouses: the ones closest to them. This research points out that Facebook possesses tools to get to know us better than we know ourselves, which causes an asymmetry in status and thereby grants the company the opportunity to exercise different forms of control. I will expand on this in the third chapter when discussing the republican understanding of freedom.
However, the exercise of control is only one of the possible goals or outcomes of surveillance. For example, Gary Marx describes surveillance at its most basic level as “a way of accessing data”, which
also includes “pro-social aspects” like the enhancement of institutional efficiency and offering protection (Marx 2015, 33; 38). He argues that whether surveillance is harmful depends on the context in which it is used, which falls in line with Solove’s ideas concerning privacy. As I will point out, surveillance as control is very present in our current context, as surveillance by tech companies is being expanded to virtually every domain of human existence. The only incentive these companies seem to have is to gain more control in order to increase their revenues. I think this is a problem in many ways, which I will address in the next chapter.
1.4 Conclusion
The purpose of this first chapter has been to show that the public/private distinction is fundamentally unclear and ambiguous, and that the way in which it is interpreted should be adapted to the context of society. The discussion on Arendt’s tripartite division showed that the modern rise of the social sphere has changed the meaning of both public and private realm, thereby threatening the possibility of attaining freedom in action. It was argued that in order to protect this freedom under modern conditions, privacy should be considered as having social value rather than as having a merely privative function. From this follows that a conception of privacy should be context-based, thereby reflecting relevant societal circumstances. Since modern circumstances are characterized by the proliferation of corporate surveillance practices, these should be taken into account when constructing a meaningful conception of privacy. These practices and their implications will be the topic of the following chapter.
2.
Privacy in contemporary context
The modern context characterized by surveillance as control will be discussed along the lines of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) by Shoshana Zuboff. Based on the modern conditions of surveillance capitalism, a conception of privacy will be formulated which makes sense in the modern, digital world that we live in. This chapter will be concluded with a discussion of the risks of ubiquitous surveillance and the lack of privacy that is caused by it.
2.1 Surveillance capitalism
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), Shoshana Zuboff extensively discusses the ways in which the current use of surveillance techniques by private companies is affecting our lives. She does so by showing how our privacy is constantly being invaded by services and ‘smart’ devices that are seemingly designed to grant individuals the opportunity to lead more effective and efficient lives (Zuboff 2019, 6). According to her, this is a consequence of the modern logic of surveillance capitalism, due to which human experience is being treated as “free raw material for translation into behavioural data” (Zuboff 2019, 8). While some of these data are used by technological companies in order to develop their services and to improve their products, all the rest is considered as “behavioural surplus” and is used for less innocent commercial purposes, like targeted advertisements and the fabrication of prediction products in order to be able to predict users’ actions. In this way, companies do not only acquire knowledge, but also the power to control people’s behaviour (Zuboff 2019, 8).
From this follows that despite the promises of better, faster, safer, easier way of living, many technological ‘improvements’ have a dark side. According to Zuboff,
[E]ven the most innocent-seeming applications such as weather, flashlights, ride-sharing, and dating apps are “infested” with dozens of tracking programs that rely on increasingly bizarre, aggressive, and illegible tactics to collect massive amounts of behavioural surplus ultimately directed at ad targeting (Zuboff 2019, 137).
She argues that the knowledge that is gathered by these applications and the rights to decide what to do with that knowledge is no longer owned or exercised by the individual in question, but have been usurped by tech companies (Zuboff 2019, 7).
These developments have implications for two elemental rights, which Zuboff calls the right to sanctuary and the right to the future tense. The first right entails the “human need for a space of
inviolable refuge” (Zuboff 2019, 21). With this, Zuboff follows Arendt’s idea of the necessity of a hiding place from the rest of the world which is threatened by the social sphere, in this case embodied by the ubiquitous invasion of surveillance practices. Without this private hiding place, human flourishing and individuality is made impossible, since others’ views are constantly imposed on us. Our right to sanctuary is being violated by tech firms constantly observing our behaviour and gathering our data, often while we are unaware of it.
The second right, the right to the future tense, is meant to safeguard what Zuboff calls “freedom to will”, which is our claim to shaping our own future (Zuboff 2019, 330). This freedom is being undermined by the use of surveillance practices because the purpose is not only to observe, but also to modify our behaviour. The right to the future tense should be considered as an element of freedom under modern conditions because it is being threatened by surveillance capitalist whose revenues are dependent on the predictability of our behaviour. And how could they better predict our behaviour than by actively shaping it towards their commercial or political ends? In this way, the outcomes of human ‘action’ are being guaranteed, just like the tech firms’ revenues.
The attempts to behaviour modification by surveillance capitalists strip us from our freedom to will, and thereby our freedom in action as described by Arendt. In The Human Condition
she argues that one of the features of action that often cause it to be considered as a burden is its unpredictability (Arendt 1958, 242). Simply put, this could be interpreted as the fact that you never know what is going to happen exactly when you do something: maybe what you did or said does not have the outcome you expected, or maybe you change your mind and decide to do something completely different.Arendt argues that in order to live with this aspect of human activity, we invented promises as “islands of predictability” in an “ocean of uncertainty” (Arendt 1958, 244). Tech firms and their development and usage of prediction products are taking away our capacity of making promises to ourselves and others by trying to get rid of this ocean. In this way, the firms are usurping our right to the future tense and thereby seize our freedom to will. Due to economic or political interests, we are only granted a right to their interpretation of a future tense, and are only ‘free’ to will their will.
These constant threats to our right to the future tense are strengthened by the fact that we do not any longer have our right to sanctuary, which would grant us a place to hide from these powers. This leads to what Zuboff calls “a world of no exit”, in which surveillance capitalists and their instrumentarian power have invaded every aspect of our lives (Zuboff 2019, 471). Jürgen Habermas’ distinction between the lifeworld and the system may come to mind here, since Zuboff’s discussion on the discovery of the behavioural surplus could be described as the ‘system’ colonizing the ‘lifeworld’.The lifeworld can be described as the sphere of everyday communicative linguistic interactions, that is oriented in the
direction of mutual understanding. The system, on the other hand, has an instrumental and strategic function and is used to refer to rational institutions that are regulated by different types of “media”, for example, monetary exchange, the law and administration (Feenberg 1995, 56).
System and lifeworld could be interpreted as two different orientations of human action, rather than as two completely separate spheres. However, the colonization of the lifeworld by the system is a dangerous development, because the logic guiding the economic market is making its way into activities where the logic of mutual understanding should be working (Roessler 2014, 152-154). This means that means of money and power are no longer an exclusive part of the system, but start to become a part of daily life. Based on this line of thinking, it could be argued that technology is one of the media that is moving from the system to our daily lives and that it should be limited in order to protect our social relationships in the lifeworld.
Zuboff defines the instrumentarian power of tech firms as the knowing and shaping of human behaviour toward others’ ends, which manifests itself by the “increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of “smart” networked devices, things, and spaces” (Zuboff 2019, 11). But how did this new form of power come about, and in what ways is it being exercised? According to Zuboff, instrumentarian power originated due to the discovery of the behavioural surplus. Since she thinks that “Google is to surveillance capitalism what the Ford Motor Company and General Motors were to mass-production-based managerial capitalism,” and her discussion of the rise of surveillance capitalism and the discovery of the behavioural surplus is constructed mainly along the lines of the activities of this company (Zuboff 2019, 63). She describes how Google went from using behavioural data merely for the improvement of the service delivered to users, to the use of these data in order to increase the profit derived from advertisements, which was necessary for the company’s survival. Google discovered that when this behavioural surplus was as big as possible, user behaviour could be predicted more and more precisely, which would lead to an enormous increase in advertisement revenues.
One of the implications of the discovery over the behavioural surplus is that Google started to “read users’ minds” in order to craft a custom-made advertisement strategy for each individual deduced from their online behaviour (Zuboff 2019, 78). With this, Zuboff argues, Google made clear that the company would not take people’s decision rights over their own personal information into account, even though these rights were included in the original social contract between the company and its users (Zuboff 2019, 77).
Zuboff characterizes the way in which we are “cornered” by companies like Google as a continuous process of dispossession of data to increase the behavioural surplus. This process has four steps: incursion, habituation, adaptation and redirection (Zuboff 2019, 138-140). The first stage consists
of the hunt for behavioural surplus from “the nonmarket spaces of everyday life”, of which the decision rights are consequently claimed. The second stage, habituation, entails that while democratic institutions are beginning to take action by the time-consuming means of filing lawsuits and starting investigations, surveillance capitalists continue the development of their controversial practices at a high pace. In the third stage, some minor adaptations are made in order to soothe the authorities and public opinion and satisfying their immediate demands. Lastly, redirection takes place, which entails that “supply operations are directed just enough so that they appear to be compliant with social and legal demands” (Zuboff 2019, 140). In most cases, redirection means the attempt to restore the company’s reputation. An example of redirection can be found in the way in which Facebook dealt with the Cambridge Analytica scandal that was mentioned in the previous chapter.9 The company’s vice-president, Nick Clegg, stated that there was no evidence concerning the case of the Brexit referendum, and argued instead that “the roots to British euroscepticism go very deep". By arguing that Facebook had nothing to do with the result of the referendum, he tried to restore Facebook’s image.
Examples of these controversial practices by which users’ privacy rights are violated on a daily basis are “terms-of-service agreements”. These kinds of agreements are also known as “click-wrap” or “browse-wrap” agreements and serve as legal cover for extracting ever-more data from users which are unrelated to the service and additional benefits offered (Zuboff 2019, 48). The reason for this is that people get ‘wrapped’ into these contracts by simply clicking a box without ever reading the actual agreement. As opposed to paper contracts, digital terms “can be expanded, reproduced, distributed and archived at no additional costs” (Zuboff 2019, 49). In this way, contracts have lost their original meaning, which leads to the fact that our rights are being seized without our consent or even our awareness. Terms of service can be altered at any time without even notifying users, and typically implicate third parties while the responsibility for their terms of service is not being accepted (Zuboff 2019, 49).
How could this happen? Apart from the four stages as discussed above, one simple fact is at play here: no one reads terms-of-service-agreements. Why not? Because they are this way by design: it would take hours to do so, and if you decide not to accept, you will not be able to use the service provided. Research by two American professors in 2008 concluded that “a reasonable reading of all the privacy policies that one encounters in a year would require 76 full workdays at a national opportunity cost of $781 billion”. Today, eleven years later, these numbers are likely to be much higher (McDonald and Craner 2008).
9 See for example this news report by BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48740231 [Date Accessed: August 3, 2019].
It should be noted, Zuboff claims, that these consequences of surveillance technology are features of internet companies, not ‘bugs’ (Zuboff 2019, 15). They are deliberately constructed and not an inevitable consequence of technology, but a result of the “extraction imperative”, leading companies to extract ever-more behavioural surplus in order to increase profit. An important aspect of surveillance practices related to this imperative is the secrecy that is necessary during the process of the constant accumulation of behavioural surplus (Zuboff 2019, 87-89). Users are often lied to and kept in the dark about the mechanisms that are at play during this process. The fact that companies are able to choose for this secrecy clearly shows how surveillance capitalism has laid claim to decision rights.
Due to this process, we have become the objects instead of the subjects of the realization of value. Zuboff expresses this as follows:
The remarkable questions here concern the facts that our lives are rendered as behavioural data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that there is no exit, no voice, and no loyalty, only helplessness, resignation, and psychic numbing; and that encryption is the only positive action left to discuss when we sit around the dinner table and casually ponder how to hide from the forces that hide from us (Zuboff 2019, 94-95).
This passage powerfully exposes the implications of the way in which companies are currently using surveillance techniques and how we are cornered by the logic of surveillance capitalism. Since the surveillance project is constructed around our dependence on technology designed in order to make our lives more effective, there does not seem to be any way to escape it. Due to this, our privacy is constantly being undermined and our decision rights over who has what kind of information about us are being disregarded. The relation of control that has been established by the surveillance project seems to have seized our freedom and has made many of us indifferent towards the consequences of surveillance. Due to the difficulties involved in avoiding near-constant surveillance, tech firms induce a sense of helplessness in users.
A much heard ‘argument’ against the danger of surveillance that originates from this helplessness is “I have nothing to hide” (Zuboff 2019, 11). In order to show why having something to hide is not what is currently at stake, we need to look back at the violation of our right to the future tense, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Surveillance in the sense of the current discussion is not just about acquiring knowledge, it is about using this knowledge in order to exercise instrumentarian
power. Over the past decade, a shift has taken place from automated machine processes only knowing our behaviour to shaping our behaviour at scale: “it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us
; the goal now is to automate us
” (Zuboff 2019, 8). This is a consequence of the “prediction imperative”, due to which companies are urged to constantly enhance the quality of their prediction products in order to increase revenues from advertisements and other services (Zuboff 2019, 200-201).Zuboff discusses three main approaches that are currently used to achieve behaviour modification. The first is “tuning”, and is applied in several ways. One of these is “nudging”, which happens for example in the case of putting healthier food choices on eye-level and the unhealthy ones more out of sight, or a website that requires going through numerous obscure pages in order to opt-out of its tracking cookies (Zuboff 2019, 294). The second approach is called “herding” and refers to controlling elements in an agent’s immediate context. Examples could be a fridge that is programmed to lock up to keep someone from overeating, or a TV to shut off because you have been watching too long (Zuboff 2019, 295). Another example is the option to remotely control the motor of a leased car, in order to make sure that it will not start when someone is behind on payments (Zuboff 2019, 213). This use of behavioural modification could also be referred to as “Digital Paternalism” (Susskind 2018, 198). The third approach is “conditioning” and follows the idea that behaviour modification should mimic the evolutionary process. The idea of this is to capture people’s behaviours, for example using an activity tracker and a corresponding app, identify ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviours and consequently developing techniques that try to make you show improvements (Zuboff 2019, 296).
Some of these methods may seem quite innocent, but the situation changes when the agent is unaware of them being used or when this happens without consent. Since many surveillance practices are operating quietly in the background, we usually will not be aware of the power being exerted over us. For example, how are you supposed to know whether a news algorithm subtly promotes one narrative over another? As Jamie Susskind points out in his book Future Politics (2018) , the problem is10 this: “The best technology in the future won’t feel obtrusive. It won’t feel like technology at all
” (Susskind 2018, 194). Zuboff gives the example of behavioural modification without awareness and consent during a Facebook experiment, in which researchers manipulated “the social and informational content of voting-related messages in the news feeds of nearly 61 million Facebook users”. This research showed that the manipulations were effectively changing real-time behaviour, since people were more likely to click the “I Voted” button when they were shown pictures of their friends who already clicked the button, than when this was not the case (Zuboff 2019, 299).Although my focus in this thesis is on the controlling power possessed and exercised by private companies, it should be noted that state power will also benefit from the instrumentarian power of tech firms. Governmental authorities already profit from the technologies owned by surveillance capitalists: in 2011, Google received over 10,000 government requests for information, and complied with 93 percent of these (McChesney 2014, 166). It could therefore be argued that “Big Brother [...] has been replaced by a swarm of corporate ‘Little Brothers’”(Susskind 2018, 155).
In order for behavioural modifications to work, the secrecy caused by a lack of awareness is necessary. In that way, autonomy and self-determination are undermined, making the agent less free without her even knowing. Since the agent is unaware of the interference taking place, this diminution of freedom is difficult to expose when adhering to the liberal conception of freedom as non-interference. This point will be further elaborated in the third chapter. For now, I briefly want to discuss in what ways the practices of surveillance capitalism are restrictive of the following three basic freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of movement.
While technology has enlarged our freedom of speech by the development of new communicative platforms like Facebook, the communication that takes place through these new media is dependent upon the restraint of the ones in control, which means that there is no actual freedom in the republican sense.11 The ones in control of the platform make the rules, over which we have no control but to which our speech entirely subject. Through algorithmic regulations, thousands of automatic decisions that affect our freedom of speech are made on a daily basis (Susskind 2018, 191).
Freedom of thought is restrained because tech firms are given control of our perception of the world by letting them decide what we get to see. We trust Google to find and gather information about the world, to make decisions about what is relevant to report and what is not, decide on the level of context and detail. Freedom of movement is also at risk: on the one hand, technologies like self-driving cars increase our freedom because we can do what we want when we are on the road, and do not even need to have a driver’s license in order to do so. On the other hand, as will be pointed out in the next paragraph, our freedom to go somewhere without leaving a record of it is taken away. Also, minor traffic offences like driving over the speed limit or parking illegally are made impossible (Susskind 2018, 191-192).
2.2 The informational panopticon
Now the current context of surveillance capitalism has been discussed, the time has come to construct a suitable conception of privacy to meet the demands of a society characterized by ubiquitous surveillance
and attempts to behaviour modification. At the end of the first chapter, it was argued that adhering to one rigid conception of privacy would exclude many of the prevailing issues from the discussion. However, in order to be able to protect our privacy under the circumstances just discussed, a unifying foundation for the different usages and meanings of privacy should be identified, taking the privacy demands caused by these conditions into account.
Such a rejoining account is offered by Thomas Scanlon, and can be described as “the interest we have in being able to be free from certain kinds of intrusion” (Roessler 2017, 190). Beate Roessler uses Scanlon’s account to formulate the following definition of privacy: “having control over others’ access to one’s own person” (Roessler 2017, 191). Based on this broad definition, Roessler distinguishes three respects in which privacy should be protected in order for autonomy to be possible: local or domestic privacy, decisional privacy and informational privacy (Roessler 2017, 191).
The first respect means having a place to retreat from the public, and could be considered as a mere privative interpretation of privacy. Decisional and informational privacy can be defined respectively as the privacy to choose and act; and the idea that “[w]e can live autonomous lives only if we can be certain that it is more or less up to us who has what kind of knowledge about us” (Roessler 2017, 191-192). Both these two respects of privacy are crucial when it comes to protection against modern surveillance practices. As discussed in the previous paragraph, surveillance capitalists are constantly invading our decisional privacy by using our personal data and trying to modify our behaviour, and our informational privacy by gathering these data in the first place.
Jeffrey Reiman offers another account of privacy that is relevant in the context of surveillance capitalism. In his article “Driving to the Panopticon” (2004), he wants to point out the privacy-related risks of the implementation of Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS), which can be used to “track vehicles and provide drivers with information concerning road conditions and optimal routes” (Reiman 2004, 194). Reiman’s problem with this is that in order to reach this goal, a lot of information concerning the travel routes and times of citizens will be collected and stored, which could form a threat when used in disadvantage of the travellers (Reiman 2004, 195). This shows that his discussion of the privacy and freedom implications of IVHS are applicable to the situation as depicted by Zuboff.
Reiman connects the use of surveillance techniques to Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon - the circular prison that could be surveilled by one single guard due to the permanent visibility of the prisoners - and Michel Foucault’s metaphorical use of the concept for “the mechanisms of large-scale social control that characterize the modern world” (Reiman 2004, 195). Foucault’s point was that the awareness of their visibility makes people carry out their own subjection and control (Reiman 2004, 195). Reiman wants to stretch the panopticon metaphor even further to emphasize not only the way in
which people are made visible, but also the way in which they are visible from a single point (Reiman 2004, 196).
His definition of privacy is as follows: “the condition in which others are deprived of access to you” (Reiman 2004, 197). Access, in this case, means experience and information about an agent. I think this idea of ‘deprivation of access’ is more inclusive than Roessler’s idea of ‘control over access,’ since the notion of control narrows down the understanding of the value of privacy to only those aspects of privacy in which control is important. According to Reiman, it is not just about control or power over access, but also about mere deprivation of access. This is more fitting for cases in which surveillance is at play, since the ability to control who has access and who has not is not the most urgent demand: we just do not want others to have this information, period (Reiman 2004, 198-199). The right to privacy can then be defined as the right that others are deprived of access to (experiences and information of) me.
Reiman considers a right to privacy to be moral rather than merely legal, which can be compared to Solove’s idea of the social rather than the individual value of privacy. In order to make this clear, Reiman proposes the idea of “the informational Panopticon
”, of which surveillance practices like IVHS constitute a part. This Panopticon, “this whole complex of information gathering”, is what Reiman considers as a real threat (Reiman 2004, 200-201). This threat is divided into four categories, which will be explained below.The first is “the risk of extrinsic loss of freedom”, which entails all the ways in which a lack of privacy makes people vulnerable for their behaviour to be controlled by others (Reiman 2004, 201). This is related to the point John Stuart Mill makes in On Liberty
(1975[1859]) about safeguarding the space necessary for unconventional behaviour as long as no harm is done to others (Mill 1975, 10-11). When people are generally visible, it is likely that their behaviour will be adjusted to the norm, which is brought about by social pressure to conform. Reiman’s point is that people need privacy in order to act freely, and follows Mill in constructing this argument (Reiman 2004, 202-203).The second threat is “the risk of intrinsic loss of freedom”, which means that a lack of privacy directly limits people’s freedom in a way that is independent of social pressure or other external factors. From this follows that privacy is itself constitutive of freedom, and not just a means of protecting it (Reiman 2004, 203-204). Reiman gives two examples: a lack of privacy takes away the freedom to choose who has what kind of knowledge of me, not out of fear for the consequences, but simply because the possibility to choose is taken away; and the fact that due to the implementation of IVHS, citizens are no longer free to drive somewhere without leaving a record of doing so, along with which the freedom of acting spontaneously is lost as well (Reiman 2004, 204). Freedom is being restrained in this way, because “[w]hen you know you are being observed, you naturally identify with the outside
observer’s viewpoint and add that alongside your own viewpoint on your action” (Reiman 2004, 205). The knowledge that what you do will become part of a record, changes behaviour and takes away spontaneity.
The third way in which the informational panopticon poses a threat is in the sense of “symbolic risks”, and entails that invasions of privacy could be considered as insults in the sense that an individual’s self-ownership and dignity are being denied (Reiman 2004, 205). In this way, one’s individual sovereignty is taken away, and as a consequence of surveillance practices and the search for ever-more behavioural surplus, we are reduced to someone else’s data. This risk is symbolic, because we are not literally deprived of our self-ownership like slaves, but are insulted by losing this self-ownership due to the fact that we cannot shield ourselves against the observation of every move we make. However, Reiman notes that this is not merely symbolic in the sense that our self-conceptions are actually shaped by these circumstances: “Growing up in the informational Panopticon, people will be less likely to acquire selves that think of themselves as owning themselves. They will say mine
with less authority, and yours
with less respect” (Reiman 2004, 206).The fourth and last risk that Reiman discusses it the “risk of psychopolitical metamorphosis”, which means that we will fundamentally change in something different from what we are currently. With this, he means that when someone is treated as worthy of less respect, they will act so too: “total visibility infantilizes people” (Reiman 2004, 207). When people move toward adulthood, they are granted more privacy, but when people are instead deprived of privacy, they will not be able to reach this adult stage because they are not taken seriously as an individual. Following Mill, Reiman argues that as a consequence of permanent visibility, people will only do what is conventional, by which their inner lives will be eventually impoverished.
These four categories each have a different emphasis, but they point to the same problem: constant visibility changes people’s lives for the worse, even if no actual interference is taking place. Reiman therefore concludes by stating that “we will need to prevent not only the misuse of information but also the fear that it is being misused
