This list of 10 reasons why people conform to social pressure prompted me to dig into the drafts and publish my last post “Another Privacy Experiment.”
A cursory search at Google Scholar shows a lot of material to wade through about the interaction between social conformity and privacy.
An old idea (2008) from the drafts folder that I’m posting now. A related post back in 2008.
Two people are interviewed by a single person. During the interview the interviewer tells the subject a private piece of information about a third person, called X. Three conditions: shares information without comment, tells subject not to share information, pays subject small amount ($10-$20) to not share information.
Then the subject is interviewed by another person, perhaps at a later date. The second interviewer asks this person what they know about X. Who among the three conditions will share the information divulged by the first interviewer?
Other variables to throw in - X is a public/non-public figure, information shared about X is trivial/non-trivial, X is in a position of authority/weakness.
I’ve been reading Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein with some fellow philosophers over the last few weeks. We’ve reached the point where Wittgenstein argues against private languages and qualia, like pain.
Wittgenstein argues against private descriptions or recognitions of these experiences, according to him we learn how to use the word “pain” in a certain context, together with certain expressions and feelings. We may act as though we have indicated some internal sensation to ourselves when we use a word like “pain” but there is no way to verify the identity of this word with any of our previous experiences of pain.
In the Blue Book Wittgenstein proposes a thought experiment where the nerves and hands of two people are connected together and then the hand is stung by a wasp. “Both of us cry, contort our faces, give the same description of the pain, etc. Now are we to say we have the same pain or different ones?” (54)
I was trying to think up counterexamples for this problem and alighted upon intoxication. Surely when I take a drink I am the only person who becomes intoxicated and my feelings are definitely my own.
But my quest was futile. The sociologists are already at work destroying this objection.
Angus Bancroft was interviewed on BBC radio about his research on drugs and context. It turns out that the effect of drugs on people is much more socially determined than I originally supposed.
There are tribes in Africa who drink almost pure alcohol without any of the boisterousness or boorish behavior we expect to see on a typical Friday night. Howard Becker studied marijuana users in the 1950s and discovered that first-time users did not get high. Becker theorized that they did not know how to get high; they had to learn how to smoke, recognize the effects, and learn to enjoy the sensations.
Back to Wittgenstein:
ยง272. The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar, but that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible - though unverifiable - that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and another section another.
Up early this morning to get into town in time for the 8a.m. plenary talk by Bill Moyers. Moyers has spoken at all four NCMRs to date, hosts a rocking show on PBS and spoke eloquently today about the abdication of responsibility by the dominant media over the last 8 years plus. Some great quotes: “the 4th estate has become a 5th column against democracy”; “capitalism breeds destruction unless tempered by an intuition of equality.” See this twitter update by kaeti - I totally agree.
This panel was filled with long-term activists, most of whom have been working in public access television for many years. Technologically it feels like a bit of throwback but as one person concluded - Web2.0 may be an answer to a lot of problems but we can’t forget to ask what is the question we are trying to answer. For the people in this room it was all about getting the stories of people out to the masses.
Louis Massiah started off by describing his work with the Scribe video center in Philadelphia and their project “Precious Places.” They have spent the last 4 years working with local filmmakers, scholars, and community members to create over 40 documentaries about neighborhoods in Philadelphia. He shared with us a portion of the prototype documentary about Francisville which was a really profoundly moving story of 1960s gang members being transformed into community activists. My favorite quote - “You could buy denim here [on main street] that would stay blue for 6 months.”
Peggy Berryhill of the Native Public Media provided another great quote “our lives are so labeled [1st generation urban Indian]…our lives are filled with anthropologists.” She reiterated the need for pride of place and community. Her group is working with 30+ native radio stations across the United States to build an infrastructure for Native American radio.
Lauren-Glenn Davitian from Vermont CCTV talked about the success that Vermont has had with public access television. There are 43 access channels in a state with only 600,000 people. Burlington, VT is building its own fiber optic network because the existing infrastructure monopolies, cable and telephone, can’t be trusted to protect the public interest or provide access to the public airwaves. We were lucky to get as much public access TV as we did in the 1970s and 1980s because cable companies are becoming much more stingy over time.
A bunch of cool community project were mentioned during the Q&A. KTNN, native american radio in Arizon, Thurston television center in Washington state, WOJB radio in Wisconsin, People TV from Atlanta, Deep Dish Network Waves of Change.
I thought this panel was going to focus on violations of information privacy by private companies but it ended up being more of a cross between private and governmental invasions of privacy. The central topic was the NSA wiretapping scandal and the complicity of telecom companies.
Lillie Coney from EPIC started out by describing some of the long history of surveillance cooperation between government and private industry, from communication intercepts during the Civil War, to Western Unions intercepting telegrams during WW2 and the Cold War, to the present day. It starts with a declaration of war and a climate of fear that ends up with a general walking into a CEOs office and demanding access to data “for the national interest.”
Tim Jones from EFF talked about their work on the NSA story and the facts they uncovered: domestic surveillance happened, it was a dragnet not a targeted search, and there were 15-20 telecom centers throughout the US that were turned into NSA branch offices. The FISA law was created to protect us because we’ve been down the surveillance road before - COINTELPRO, Church Committee, Project Shamrock at the NSA, Project Chaos at the CIA.
Marcy from Firedoglake described their research efforts surrounding the NSA wiretapping and the three prong strategy of research, education, and mobilization that led to some of the successes we’ve had to date preventing telecom immunity from passing.
Tim Sparapani from the ACLU brought the discussion back to what I thought it would be from the beginning by talking about the commercial data brokers who are creating a privatized dossier system by harvesting public and commercial data. I especially liked the strange loop that occurs as large data aggregators buy public information, like birth and death records, combine it private information about purchasing patterns and internet histories, and then sell that information back to public law enforcement at the state and federal levels. So we pay our taxes to collect this information twice, once as a public good and then again as a private aggregation. It’s another form of data enclosure. It has led to the creation of quasigovernmental companies who get the lucrative federal communications contracts and then give up private data when asked.
Bob Edgar from Common Cause sprinkled a bunch of quotations into his moderation but this one by Martin Luther King, Jr. was my favorite. He used part of this but the whole was too beautiful for me to pass up. The complete speech is here.
Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”
We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
I think all of this needs to go into an Openness Manifesto of some kind. Everywhere I turn I’m seeing open courseware, open education, open access, open source, open data, open Congress, open information, public access and more.
First, create a questionnaire that asks increasingly private questions. Surely some social psychologist somewhere has developed an instrument or rubric that measures privacy or the perception of privacy. Make two versions of this questionnaire, one for individuals and another for organizations or businesses.
Second, sample two groups of people. One group is given/asked questions about their personal private life. Ask people questions until they feel uncomfortable or refuse to answer further questions. Then follow up to find out reasons why they felt uncomfortable. In the second group do the same thing but with questions about an organization or company that subject works for.
Hypothesis, people will be generally more protective or wary of violating the privacy of the organization/group they work with than they would be for their own, personal privacy.
Possible explanation:
A recent forum on information ethics for the Minnesota Special Libraries Association prompted me to think about privacy.
Assume that individual privacy is undergoing a massive shift because of the advent of large aggregate databases, technical innovations like the web, and, perhaps, a changing attitude among younger generations. The discussion at the meeting centered on social web applications like Facebook, Google, and LibraryThing. A lot of people are sacrificing privacy for the perceived value of a service like GMail, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Librarians have long defended the privacy of patrons by destroying circulation records as soon as possible but in the new social web world patrons are sharing the information librarians protected by posting it on LibraryThing or elsewhere. In order to compete on services libraries may have to reconsider the bedrock ethical principles surrounding the analysis and storage of patron information.
But the even bigger question I wonder about is how organizations will respond in this brave new privacy world. So far most of the erosion of privacy has taken place on the part of individuals. But the organizations and institutions that we all interact with continue to profit from that data and zealously guardt data from being used openly by others.
From a commons perspective this might be another form of enclosure. Individuals choose to contribute to the public commons and then that information is enclosed and “monetized” by companies. Leading to ideas like digital sharecropping and crowdsourcing.
A countervailing trend for public companies are the securities regulations promulgated by the SEC. Here the explicit bargain is in exchange for access to capital markets the company must disclose a certain amount of information to the public. After the Enron scandals the Sarbanes-Oxley bill increased the requirements for public disclosure. But there was, and continues to be, a lot of opposition to that.
It seems we may be headed into a world where privacy becomes more and more a matter of financial resources. Companies can afford to pay the lawyers and technicians needed to keep information locked up behind closed doors. Individuals don’t have that luxury.
When it comes to professional responsibility SLA and other organizations are in a bind. A lot of professional ethics statements protect the privacy of the organizations where people work. Should this continue to be the case? If a significant part of the public gives up its privacy to organizations then why can’t we expect the same openness in return?
From Business Week:
An interview with Prchard Purcell, the privacy czar.
My job is dedicated to transferring control of information back to where I think it belongs -- in the hands of the individual. But that assumes they ever had control. That's not the case. In the offline world, for decades and decades, information has been gathered and shared and used completely outside of the control of the individual. So if I say, "Gee, I really want to turn control back to the individual," what's that going to mean in terms of how much work there is? And what's it going to mean in terms of a person's ability to do it?