On Privacy

The Facebook hearings. 🤦

We want social networks with better privacy! OK, but what do we mean by that? At the Facebook hearings, neither side seemed to know. And we need to know what privacy is about for people, in general, to know what’s wrong with Facebook or how to fix it.

Zuckerberg and the politicians—they imagine privacy as if it were a software feature. In particular, they imagine a system has “good privacy” if it’s consensual and configurable; that is, if people explicitly agree to something, and understand what they agree to, that’s somehow “good for privacy”. Even usually-sophisticated-analysts like Zeynep Tufekci have taken this as the definition of privacy.

But it looks very different if you take privacy as a way of living, rather than a software feature.

Imagine you’re at a party, confiding something to a good friend. A new person joins. Someone you don’t know. Will you continue with your friend? Do you trust the new person, and fold them into the conversation? Do you test them first — asking them some questions, checking if they’re the type of person with which you can be intimate, like with your…