Humanizing the Narrative Around Privacy

Every day, our personal data is collected, used, and stored, but few of us fully understand what exactly happens to it. Sometimes data practices are secret, sometimes they are obscured in legal language, and sometimes they are directly harmful. When the media covers issues related to data and privacy, the human side is often left out, and instead the focus is on laws, procedures, and generalities. We want to change that.

Recently, the Center for Democracy & Technology, in collaboration with the Ford Foundation and the MIT Media Lab’s Media Cloud project, convened an intersectional group of advocacy organizations to take a closer look at current media narratives around privacy online and see where new narratives might be helpful in driving real change.

Our Media Cloud Research

We wanted to look closely at the current media narratives to uncover patterns around data & privacy coverage, and test our general assumptions. Does the coverage highlight the ways our data-driven lives are opening us up to risks, and the special pressure this puts on vulnerable people and communities?

In the months before the workshop, Media Cloud analyzed thousands of articles from over 10,000 s of local, state, and national traditional news sources in the U.S. The initial research showed that privacy is often covered in relation to crime, data security, and major events around corporate missteps, but is less often connected to issues of race and gender. Topics that dominated press coverage around privacy included Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Russia; health privacy; and accusations of abuse against public figures.

A Deeper Dive on the Media Coverage

With the research in mind, workshop participants thought about the communities they work with and how they were — or were not — represented in the media’s dialogue. We all took a closer look at a number of actual articles, and the participants found that most of the people affected every day by data systems are represented either poorly or not at all in most stories. Instead, the perspectives of company representatives, law enforcement, government officials, and occasionally academics or advocates dominated the narrative. Overall, press coverage of privacy issues did not go deeply into the harms propagated by data systems, making those issues difficult for readers to relate to and invest in. The media coverage also did not link stories about breaches of concerns with data privacy together under a broader explanation of the issue. This episodic frame does not lend itself to readers feeling fully informed and empowered.

Takeaways

Several themes from the workshop stand out. The first is that data systems can change lives, as the result of incomplete data, bad decision-making models, lack of human oversight, or just plain availability or obscuring of data. Another is that the risks of bad data practices are currently borne mostly by people at the margins — but these issues will affect more people as time goes on.

In a world where life is increasingly lived online, “I have nothing to hide” is no longer a good reason to cast aside privacy. In the U.S. today, anyone’s financial situation can change quickly as a result of a medical emergency. Anyone could unexpectedly become the subject of a viral news story, unemployed, or the victim of abuse. In short, where you are today may not be where you are tomorrow, and data systems have immense power to hurt or help people — especially those in vulnerable positions. It benefits everyone to understand how they work, and they should work to everyone’s benefit. When reporting on privacy and data issues, media should engage the communities that are most affected by these systems to provide a more complete picture of the risks they carry, who they don’t work for, and why.

What’s Next

We hope that this workshop is just the beginning. The groups in attendance plan to engage regularly to uncover new stories and narratives around privacy, and collectively share those stories to better inform media coverage. We’d also like to engage more groups and communities in this effort, with the ultimate goal of shifting public policies and corporate practices to be more focused on the human impact of data decisions.

Interested in being a part of humanizing privacy? We’d love to hear from you!