privacy is control

18 Jan, 2010 • posts i've written • 5 comments

danah boyd, in her recent post Facebook’s move ain’t about changes in privacy norms:

Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me “public by default, private when necessary” but this doesn’t suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.

The evolution of technology is a progression of productivity, variability, and control. Generating personal content has gotten easier, creating polymorphic identities is now possible (business you vs social you vs dating you), and our social applications offer all kinds of control to allow that polymorphism – hence, privacy is a method of control over identity creation and management.

Saying privacy is dead is tantamount to saying identity is dead.