Privacy Quandaries – past and present
What happens when present-day privacy dilemmas meet a historical privacy angle?
On 28 January, PRIVACY's director Mette Birkedal Bruun participated in a panel at the 14th International Computer, Privacy & Data Protection Conference (CPDP), organized by the Privacy Salon. The theme for this year's conference was Enforcing Rights in a Changing World, and the conference had more than 1300 participants.
Mette Birkedal Bruun was part of the panel ‘Collectivize Facebook - A Pre-Trial: Transforming Facebook and other trillion-dollar companies into new transnational cooperatives under user control organized.’ This panel was organized by the Dutch artist Jonas Staal and the Belgian Human Rights lawyer Jan Fermon. At the CPDP, Bruun also engaged in a public studio conversation with the Dutch artist Marijn Bril concerning Bril's work on workplace surveillance, the zones and thresholds of privacy, and how art and historical research share the capacity to ask new questions and throw new kinds of light on contemporary societal issues.
As these two discussions show, historical research into notions of privacy can fruitfully inform our understanding of privacy today. Our constant encounters with the term privacy when we select our internet settings as consumers or on social media platforms makes privacy an acute here-and-now topic. However, both the term 'privacy' and the desire for it have been around for centuries.
When we look at contemporary privacy issues through the lens of history, we acquire to get a deeper understanding of the many nuances of this notion. Church historian and theologian Mette Birkedal Bruun has dedicated her research to identifying historical layers in the meaning and experience of privacy together with her colleagues at the Centre for Privacy Studies. One of the ambitions of the Centre is to mobilize historical research as a resource for the understanding of contemporary issues.
We have asked Mette Birkedal Bruun to share some of her insights from the panel discussion and the studio conversation:
What role can a historical aspect play at a conference about present-day dilemmas such as privacy with regards to multinational Social Media companies?
History helps us see things in a broader perspective. Sometimes we can detect the roots of contemporary issues in history, but for me, the structural awareness is more interesting. In the Collectivize Facebook panel, we had a fruitful discussion of these questions. We may understand this project as a form of revolution in that it transfers power to 'the people'. Which concerns do historical revolutions raise in terms of, e.g., the distribution of power, the understanding of the collective and the issue of education?
What does looking at history add to this discussion?
When we look at contemporary issues with contemporary eyes, we can sometimes get trapped in a fairly narrow perspective. History helps us to see the interaction of many different kinds of societal factors: technological, human, economical, political, social and so forth. Of course, Shoshana Zuboff has a point when she argues that the current situation is so extreme in terms of the technological developments and their implications that the perspective we have applied historically is no longer valid. But historians do know a thing or two about the ways in which radical concentrations of wealth and power and the development of new technologies influence the day to day life of people in different social circumstances.
As a theologian and a historian, do you think concepts are missing in the current discussion that we need to consider?
Theologians are trained to think about the human component in all its shades and shapes, and historical research can offer insight into a broad array of examples of human components. In the Collectivize Facebook panel, we talked about the zones and thresholds that surround privacy in its physical, mental and digital versions. This is a point that comes directly out of the research that we conduct at the Centre for Privacy Studies. I also raised a question about the role of greed – be that the greed for money, for power, for respect or for admiration. We discussed what role greed might play in a collectivized Facebook. Finally, I brought up the question of the human capacity for collectivity. We live in more or less individualistic cultures; are we even trained to take responsibility as a collective? What kind of education would we need to nurture a capacity for collectivity? Such questions grow out of a theological education as well as historical research, and I think they are vital – also when we discuss current technological developments and contemporary privacy issues.