Privacy

 What does privacy really mean in the present digital age? And, moreover, how much are we really even concerned with it? In his New York Times article, Joe Nocera calls the current state of digital security a "privacy crisis";  a countrywide (if not worldwide) state in which access to sensitive information is available to any with significant technological savvy to manipulate encryption or with the back-end clearance to do so. Where data mining is so widely practiced that now their are the businesses that see prolific profits from selling information on users. Nocera's article, however, conflates privacy and security when, I would argue, they are two separate issues when discussing this topic. It's true that new media has threatened security, by inviting the easy digitization of sensitive information such as credit card numbers, when digital data is, by its nature, so easily hackable. Regardless of demographic, it's agreed that this is problematic. Privacy, on the hand, has not only been threatened by new media, it's been complicated. 

Where once things like website's use of cookies, data mining, and other privacy breeches were little known practices, they're widely understood by new media's heaviest users. And while it might have sparked initial outrage, many of these users have come to accept it as part of the currency of new media. A trade off in which privacy breeches are acknowledged as coming pack and parcel with embedding media technology so deeply into our lives. We've discussed before the dominance of social media and networking platforms. We, as users, have become accustomed to being watched. The importance of privacy does not seem to carry the same weight that it once did now that intimate moments are so casually posted on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram for the world to see.

millennials, as we @chipotle our order on twitter: yes

In "Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations", Daniel Reed brings up another way in which new media complicates privacy, writing: "ownership, privacy, reputation and decision making are intertwined in subtle ways. What if I posed for a reunion photograph but one of my crazy cousins was dancing on the table behind me? Who controls that family reunion photograph, me, the drunken dancer in the background, the photographer with the smartphone, all of us?" New media complicates ownership and therefore the very question of the user's right to privacy. This relates to several topics we've discussed before, including the way new media creates community and it's facilitation of interaction with other people's media by recreating and/or revising it.

 Other people are involved in the process of creating new media, even if it's indirectly--the smartphone you used to take the photo was created by Apple and therefore in someway the photo itself was created in part by Apple; using Instagram to edit and share the photo means that Instagram too was involved in it's production and therefore has a certain claim, etc. Furthermore, by making the photo public how safe is it from being digested and re-imagined by other users? Think of how many photos have been turned into memes which then spawn countless variations that extend far beyond the purview of the original photographer or subject. The current younger generation of new media users understand that their information is not totally secret, that their content is not entirely unassailable. But how much do we really care anymore?


Citations
Nocera, Joe. ‘The Wild West of Privacy’. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/opinion/nocera-the-wild-west-of-privacy.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=2

Reed, Daniel. Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations. Communications of the ACM.  https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/108232-information-privacy-changing-norms-and-expectations/fulltext