We should talk about the Privacy Paradox…
On 14th January, the Norwegian Council published a collaborative report which found that dating apps such as Grindr and Tinder may be leaking users’ personal data to advertising and marketing firms in violation of the European Union’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) rules.
According to the council, those apps sent user data to at least 135 different advertisers or other third parties whose business involves behavioral profiling — in some or all cases, without giving users a viable way to opt out.
This report is alarming but is it really a surprise? To play devil’s advocate, do we look at the terms & conditions and privacy policies before sign-in to these apps? At least, do we even care ? These applications have completely revolutionized the way we date people and there are not even close to losing users, on the contrary. And yet we are aware that this is a problem. Everybody knows : politicians, journalists, our friends, our parents.
This will not prevent them from sharing all the wonderful moments of their lives on Instagram and Facebook.
Perhaps we care about privacy in some abstract way — but not enough to behave online in a way that would keep our information more secure. And if we say we value privacy, are we, as a society, able to articulate what’s wrong ?
We often say that we don’t want to be spied on — by big government or by big data, the companies that collect and sell information about every place we go online.
But our behavior suggests that we don’t really care about our privacy as much as we say we do.
We post intimate details about our lives and our families. We are sharing exactly where we are at all times. That information is valuable to all sorts of companies, and sometimes to certain government agencies. It would be impossible today to not be aware. We have deep in us this feeling that we are watched by no one knows who. Government, probably.
But it is not easy to challenge our democracy. Online surveillance is harder to prove than abuse of power, police repression and violation of fundamental rights. Michel Foucault a French philosopher, historian of ideas said :
“ Surveillance is the optimal form of oppression in democracy.”
People are supposed to be free but still have this Damocles sword over their heads. However, it is not effortless to clearly identify it. So, because we don’t know who is watching, we are cutting our freedom by ourselves. We chose our behavior : we chose to continue to swipe right on Tinder and share our data.
In this interview broadcasted in 2017 on Mid-day, Terry Walker, professor of philosophy and writer of the book “Bonds that make us free”, explains to us how digital media is transforming the notion of shame and intimacy (2:50).
He highlights the fact that we are all so willing to give details on our lives since our cellphones are offering a new kind of power: self-promotion. Even if the private sector commits data abuse, such as the targeting of potentially pregnant women , we are so busy telling everybody where we are, what we think and what we feel that we actually forget what they did.
But, why ?
More than self-promotion, digital media make us feel loved because the essence of love is being known. That’s what social media does : defining the right to be admired with likes and followers. Love is no longer generated by an indivisible whole that constitutes the person, but a superficial assembly of shared moments. Maybe this is a form of cowardice. The Internet has made our image easy to smooth and embellish.
But what about shame? We all have friends commenting their posted pictures with “I was so drunk last night”, on Facebook of Instagram. If social media is supposed to provide us love, why do we need to out our sins on it? Here again, we face a paradox.
Shame is a necessary component of morality. Confession online is liberating. It is a purgatory 2.0. People are confessing and showing their crimes because it is like absolution. Somehow guilt gets easier when it is shared.
Is this absolution sufficient compared to these pieces of freedom we are offering day after day? In the end, we are the agency of our own surveillance.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Business Strategy. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DBS.
