If you want to know why privacy matters, the play’s the thing
Last month, Oliver Stone’s Snowden biopic opened in movie theaters around the country. At the same time, a well-timed national campaign to pardon the controversial whistleblower splashed across social media and newspapers nationwide. Yet, even as the film and the petitions implored citizens to support Snowden’s cause, they also sought a far more elusive goal: to convince the American public during a raucous election season that their privacy rights are worth fighting for.
In the thirteen years I spent studying the social impact of technology for the Pew Research Center, I witnessed my fair share of hyperbolic news headlines. But none were repeated as often as those declaring some variation on “the end of privacy.” While warnings about threats to privacy can be traced back to the days of Aristotle, I first started noticing them as college student studying new media in 1999 (when the end of everything seemed to be approaching). But these headlines became especially prevalent during the years that social media went mainstream — appearing prominently in 2008, 2009, and 2010. The ensuing adoption of smartphones and the proliferation of surveillance capabilities throughout a wide range of institutions inspired similar reports in 2011 and 2012. And in the post-Snowden world of 2015, the headline even graced the cover of a special issue of Science magazine.
Many of these articles were using this headline to get readers’ attention, sounding an alarm on a rising number of privacy-related concerns. Yet the cumulative effect of all this messaging created a simmering sense of defeat: if privacy was completely and irrevocably lost, then why should we care about it? We should all just “get over it” if we have nothing to hide. Right?
As communications technologies have evolved, privacy has often been in the unfortunate position of creating uncomfortable speed bumps.
It is the third wheel to the love affair between Silicon Valley and Washington, an awkward friend that keeps showing up unannounced and making things complicated — again.
Because, let’s face it, practicing good privacy and security slows things down. From the tech side and the user side, it tends to complicate things in ways that cost both time and money. And, perhaps most importantly, it requires a kind of long-term threat modeling that’s rarely possible in the start-up tech environment or in the start-up reality of modern parenting, working, or any other challenging phase of everyday life. But just because privacy isn’t always practical for us to implement doesn’t mean we never want it. There’s a reason the “privacy paradox” continues to show up again and again in surveys of public attitudes and behaviors; people do care deeply about having control over certain kinds of personal data, but they don’t always act like it. Because sometimes they appreciate the radically public reach of the internet. And sometimes they are forced to make uncomfortable trade-offs when they just need to get something done and there is no reasonable alternative.
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Last year, in the midst of a job transition, I received an unusual email.
The subject of the message was simply, “Interview Request.” But this wasn’t a typical inquiry from a reporter looking for research to back up a story. Instead, the note, which I initially thought might be a hoax, came from a British playwright named James Graham, who described his current project, a play called “Privacy” that would be staged at the Public Theater in New York (also where “Hamilton” got its start). James explained that part of the production involved interviewing experts on background for the play, but also that the conversation may result in some of my “ideas and responses featuring in the play.”
After doing some research on the playwrights and the reviews of the London production, I was deeply intrigued. How had I not heard about this already? Who else in my network would they reach out to? Was an interview about social science research really going to produce compelling fodder for a script? And how in the world could they make an entire play about privacy relevant for general audiences?
Several weeks later, I found myself face to face in a rented conference room with James Graham and his collaborator, Josie O’Rourke. Since I was new to my role at Data & Society, I didn’t yet have a permanent office and remember feeling self-conscious as I tried to explain that the UberOffices coworking space really had nothing to do with the Uber car sharing service. It was all a bit awkward, and I felt sure that I was visibly nervous.
Over the course of our hour-long, recorded interview, James and Rosie mostly asked me about the research I did at Pew to study teenagers’ privacy practices on social media. I had done plenty of interviews over the course of my career, but this conversation was quite different. The questions were more philosophical and multi-faceted. We talked about how Americans’ attitudes about information sharing had changed over time and the various stereotypes many adults have about young people’s approaches to online privacy. And we all commiserated about how hard it is to be a young person today in a world that never forgets. But by the end of the interview, I remember feeling like I had shared more than I should have. And I worried that any mistakes I made would later be re-enacted on stage for all the world to see.
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After our interview, it would be six months before I would hear from James and Josie again. When I finally noticed a message about the play appear in my inbox, my heart sank a little.
“It is possible that you will be appearing as a character in ‘Privacy,’” it read.
Um…okay? What would my character be doing in the play? Should I write to tell them that I didn’t want to be included? What if they had taken my comments out of context?
Thankfully, it turned out that my fears were unwarranted. None of my oversharing proved to be interesting enough to make it into the script, and for the time I spent talking with the playwrights, they were kind enough to give me two tickets to see one of the preview performances.
Heading into the theater that evening, I knew from the early press coverage that Daniel Radcliffe had been cast as the lead character in the play (“The Writer”). But Radcliffe was also flanked by an outstanding cast that included SNL veteran Rachel Dratch, De’Adre Aziza, Raffi Barsoumian, Michael Countryman, and Reg Rodgers. Each supporting actor inhabited multiple roles, portraying a wide range of influential figures in the privacy world — everyone from tech luminaries and legal scholars to marketing gurus and civil liberties advocates. Even Edward Snowden made a brief appearance in the play, by way of a previously recorded and partially re-enacted conversation with Radcliffe that helped to illustrate the powerful possibilities of the documentary theater format.
Another unique feature of the production is that every night of “Privacy” is different. When each audience member buys a ticket, they also are asked to consent to the collection and use of certain personal data that will appear in various parts of the play. Without completely ruining the various surprises that are baked into the performance (in case it gets staged again), I’ll just say that the experience involves various well-timed revelations of potentially sensitive data from the audience, much of which is collected and shared via smartphones.
All of these magic tricks are supported by a fairly simple narrative scaffolding. Radcliffe’s character is in the process of mourning a recent breakup that we later learn was at least partly due to his reluctance to share enough about himself to create real intimacy with his partner. And as he wrestles throughout the play with society’s demands that he document his life online, the audience is also invited to struggle with larger questions: What does all of this surveillance on social media do to our freedom of association? How does it affect our sense of intellectual freedom? And how will we protect against new forms of discrimination that might emerge in a data-driven society?
Perhaps one of the most radical things about the play is that it doesn’t shy away from tackling these complex and controversial topics. At the same time, it also manages to be enormously entertaining. This delicate balance of education, provocation, and pleasure is not easy to achieve. And while I was initially skeptical about how the format would work, I now feel as though theater is the only place where this story could be told.
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As someone who has experienced the glaze of overwhelm in the eyes of my family and friends when I try to explain why privacy still matters, I have a profound respect for anyone who can articulate that message clearly.
One thing that writers of survey research questions and writers of dramatic scripts have in common is the challenge of accurately and clearly describing people’s engagement with technology.
Movies and TV shows often resort to hilarious visual depictions of what happens inside computers and the internet (think Hackers and other 90s-era movies about digital tech). But a live theatrical performance has to rely much more on the spoken word.
It’s the same challenge faced by lawmakers when they debate tech-related legislation, calling to mind the now-infamous description of the internet by Senator Ted Stevens as a “series of tubes.” Just a few weeks ago, there was a lengthy opinion piece in the Washington Post illustrating the troubling lack of technical fluency — particularly around cybersecurity and privacy — among the nation’s most influential lawyers and policymakers.
As others have pointed out, some of the finer details of the “Privacy” script could be refined with the help of a good legal scholar. But the performance — and the audience’s collective experience of the performance — achieved something that has been incredibly difficult to convey by even the most passionate advocates. By creating a temporary public within the space of the theater, the production made the intangible nature of pervasive data collection and privacy-related harms viscerally felt. In displaying audience members’ personal data that was siphoned off of their social media profiles, gleaned from their phones, and captured from Google street view, it beautifully illustrated the violation of what privacy scholar Helen Nissenbaum refers to as “contextual integrity.” We could all understand how this material had been taken out of its original intended context, allowing us to “see” privacy harms together that would otherwise be invisible.
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Among the many thematic threads woven throughout the play was the illustration of the myriad vulnerabilities associated with our mobile devices. As my current research and earlier studies have indicated, one of the most significant tech-related digital divides in the country right now has to do with the devices people use and the quality of their connections; low-income internet users are far more likely to rely on their mobile phone for most or all of their internet access. Most of the public conversation about digital inequalities tends to focus on the problem of speed, but having greater control over privacy and access to secure connections is also a critical feature of high-quality connectivity that’s harder to ensure when we consider how people actually use their mobile devices.
Some aspects of mobile communications tend to be more secure than using a desktop or laptop computer and a web browser (i.e. robust password protection on Apple phones or certain messaging apps that employ end-to-end encryption). However, if you don’t password protect your phone, if you’re using an outdated operating system, if you haven’t changed the default settings on your apps or tend to rely on open WiFi networks for your internet access, your mobile device may be leaking more personal data than you realize. And the intersection of those vulnerabilities with the fact that you are physically moving around in space, often revealing your location patterns, storing financial information and potentially encountering bad actors in the process, creates a constellation of risks that has been widely documented by researchers.
That some of us are more vulnerable to the misuse and manipulation of all of that data is a consequence of a complex set of social, economic, and technological factors.
But historically, the burden of surveillance has not been distributed equally in our society. The night I attended the play, I couldn’t help but think about how the price of entry and the location of the production — in the heart of New York City — was going to limit the impact of the performance. We were all in an extremely privileged position, available to spend a leisurely evening being educated and entertained. And we could all laugh at the jokes about privacy harms and reputational missteps because none of us had experienced anything that affected our ability to get a job, qualify for credit, or be wrongly accused of a crime.
Unfortunately, all of the tickets to the short run of “Privacy” sold out quickly, and I’m not aware of plans to stage a new production any time soon. And it’s a shame. Because this is an experience that should be shared as widely and publicly as possible.
Points: All the world’s a stage? At once a review of “Privacy” and a defense of thinking diligently about privacy, Mary Madden’s “If you want to know why privacy matters, the play’s the thing” synthesizes ongoing conversations around the “death of privacy” and leaves us with considerations of socioeconomic status. Stay tuned for Mary’s forthcoming report on the privacy and security experiences of low-SES populations.— Ed.
Mary Madden is a researcher at Data & Society and an affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Her work combines quantitative and qualitative social science methods to help people learn more about technology than the technology learns about them. She’s currently working on projects exploring the intersection of privacy and socioeconomic status and changes in young people’s attitudes towards the news media.
