Social networks are all the rage and for good reasons: They allow us to connect, to find people who share our interests and political agenda, to spit geographical distances in the face while searching for people to talk to. On the other hand they make many problems concerning privacy and the differences in power between individuals and governments and multinational companies painfully obvious.
How can we bring those two aspects of social interaction in sync, how can network theory help us, and what does Robinson Crusoe have to do with it all?
“No man is an Island” said John Donne in 1624 paraphrasing the deeply social character of mankind in just 5 small words. Since the beginning, humans have lived in social networks – way before mybook, facespace or whatever the current network du jour is called. Our development as a species has only been possible by living in networks and delegating certain tasks or skills: Nobody had to know everything, as long as someone else was willing to help each other out, a concept that we’ve successfully adapted and made explicit in the many hackspaces all over the planet, in the many crowd* activities that have enabled loosely linked individuals to act with the social or economic power of much stronger entities: Social connectivity is a success story.
The idea of privacy as it was formalized by Warren Brandeis (“The right to be let alone”) and Allen Westin (“The right to control, edit, manage, and delete information about them[selves] and decide when, how, and to what extent information is communicated to others”) stands in an obvious contrast to the idea of connectivity, putting the focus on the isolated individual and their desire to be able to detach themselves or parts of themselves from the social network, to control how they reveal themselves to or hide themselves from the world.
In the last few decades privacy has always been a hot topic: The need of the individual to protect themselves from potentially oppressive governments of companies has formed not only law but also our perception of privacy.
Things got back in motion when Internet-based social networks hit mainstream, and they hit it hard. For the crowd of people who had fought the good fight for the individual’s right to defend themselves against more powerful entities (governments, companies, etc.) the way the mainstream embraced those tools looked more like madness than smart decisions: The Internet does not forget and whatever’s out there stay’s out there and who could really estimate the consequences of the information they spread around so casually?
There is merit in both positions, in trying to defend the individual against potentially dangerous power as well as in making oneself more connective by putting more data points for other people to connect to out there, this talk will try to adapt all the things we’ve learned about networks (and we’ve been working with them for a long time) to create a deeper understanding for what’s happening in the “war” between privacy and openness. By stepping through a thought experiment of Robinson Crusoe rejoining society it will illustrate the status quo. Finally the talk will turn towards strategies to give the individual as much protection as possible without disconnecting from the (social) network.
How can we harness the power of networks and decentralisation without giving up our elemental freedoms and rights? How can we rethink our perception of privacy?
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