Why privacy?

A scholar interested in the dynamics of the modern public sphere can not forget that this is formulated always in relation with private life. That’s why, on behalf on the research group #Semioticom, I have attended the seminar Why privacy? hosted at CRASSH (Centre For Research In The Arts, Social Sciences And Humanities) in the University of Cambridge (18 April 2016). How to keep privacy alive in an interconnected world where every detail of individual’s life is being communicated constantly? How is privacy changing because of the changes on the public sphere?

Christena Nipper-Egg, from Indiana University, author of the book Islands of privacy (2010, University of Chicago Press), was the keynote speaker. She explained that privacy must be understood as a public matter, not only as an individual choice. Privacy enables free expression, empowering individuals and ensuring other people human rights. Also, privacy facilitates trust, friendship and intimacy, because “secrets are the currency of relationship”; managing secrets is a critical part of the managing of a relationship. A healthy private life, balanced with public one, is about to keep secret what you want to be unrevealed.

Privacy is also about to reveal what you want when you want. Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, defended some time ago, in the same Cambridge room, that if you do not want to have something you did to be know, you just should not do that. Privacy doesn't matter. (Mark Zuckemberg of Facebook did a similar statement somewhere else). But when some private issues from Schmidt where leaked, Google worked actively to banned all this information from the web.

In a contradictory manner, privacy is also about to know other people secrets when they affect your life somehow. Here, private and public life collide. There are some secrets that should circulate in the public sphere because affect many people (David’s Cameron involvement in the Panama offshore business, for instance). But, who is supposed to decide when a secret should be published or not? My tendency, as a training journalist, is to say that the journalist are the ones who have this task (but in a right professional and political environment where the criteria to decide should be only the public interest, probably too far for the one we have)

David Feldman (University of Cambridge) defends that private life should be protected by law because allow people to become useful members of society, as friends, colleagues, lovers... Public life is built on privacy.  But, as pointed by Barbara Taylor (Queen Mary, University of London), who is working in a book on the history of solitude,  privacy is something to suspect on. It seems that “only bad people doing bad things” are interested to maintain their privacy. At the same time, there is a imposition to privacy in some themes that  are supposed not to be revealed, as sexual abuse or mental health. There is a question of agency, of the right of everyone to decide what and when something should go public. That reminds me to the ideas exposed recently by Caitlin Moran in The Sunday Times on why sex education need to stay compulsory.

While we fight to teach our children how important is to keep things secrets in a web-based society, we are living in a world of celebrities: again, as Schmidt and Zuckemberg defended, the idea of an unseen life is an scandal. Our society, especially the younger ones, assume the right to know everything, explained the psychoanalyst and Professor of Litetary Theory in Goldsmith, Josh Cohen. Each person is reduced to what can be put on display, to be communicated to everybody, to become public. So, privacy is related with imagination, opposed to what can be seen or known. Extreme publicity imposes constraints in what we are able to think about; as Virginia Wolf explained, imagination needs a “room on one’s own”.

I agree with this defense of privacy as a place for imagination, free of the constraint of other’s gaze. But at the same time this imagination, if shared without a dialogical relationship with reality, can created a culture of suspicion, a theory of conspiracy, which is a basic trend of modern public sphere.

An interesting differentiation aroused in the discussion: we should not confuse publicity and exposure. The first idea (very in the line of Hannah Arendt’s public sphere) is related with common life, what is made available to a collective to construct public life. The second one is mere visibility, pure exhibitionism.

The seminar focus moved later to the role of the state and the public sphere. David Vincent (Open University) talked on the relationships between privacy and the crisis of the liberal state. We live under a secret state, which maintain a data base with the personal life of each person; we know about it but that was never discussed in the public sphere. This form of the state is closely related to the arousal of mass communications in the 20^th Century. The postal service was the basic institution that made modern state acceptable for many people who have no contact al all with official life. Since that, all communication networks have been controlled by the state, until now, when social networks and Internet providers manage also a big amount of personal data from nearly everyone.

The secret state has been built by the practices of politicians and public servants, not by the law. What is the role of the press on that? Journalist and media are supposed to be the watchdog of the state. But, as the journalist Karin Lilington, from the Irish Times, explained, it is very difficult to write an interesting story on a topic as “data protection”. Editors and, increasingly, managers are constantly worried about how to catch the attention of the readers and “unsexy” stories never reached the first page. As our own research on The construction of issues in the mediated public sphere has shown,  the circulation of an issue on the public sphere is not related directly to the importance of the issue but to the capacity of the journalists to use events or characters as “hooks” upon they can write a story that media like to publish.

Lilington defended that journalist must keep an eye on data protection and other similar public issues that never find a place in the headlines. At least, this will create a record on those issues, keeping them alive although in the periphery of the public sphere. As the Anderson report on Terrorism Legislation, quoted by Lilington, refers “a public that is unable to understand why privacy is important… is likely to be particularly susceptible to arguments that privacy should be curtailed”.

A democratic society need to be kept informed on the risk over the private life of their citizens, and dozens of journalists are committed to this mission. But they write under the pressures of the companies they work for, under the constraints of the law and, sometimes, against the apathy of the public.