Privacy: Matters to whom?
Reflection on a few articles from the NY Times Privacy Project
This week of my IxD Seminar course is about Privacy. It is one of the trending hashtags everywhere right now, a lot of people (in my circles) are bothered by their data being collected, and CEOs of large tech companies seem to be trying to clarify their company’s position on user data and privacy in their PR interviews.
I am going through the NY Times Privacy Project and learning about data collection and usage from the perspectives of different stakeholders: companies, governments, and collective opinions of people whose data is in question. I am reading through What We’ve Learned From Our Privacy Project (So Far) just to get a better summary.
I have always been curious about the connection between socioeconomic status and concern about data privacy. I found these two articles interesting in particular: The Devastating Consequences of Being Poor in the Digital Age and Google’s Sundar Pichai: Privacy Should Not Be a Luxury Good.
Mentioned in The Devastating Consequences of Being Poor in the Digital Age: The poor experience these two extremes — hypervisibility and invisibility. For instance, they may be unfairly targeted by predictive policing tools designed with biased training data or unfairly excluded from hiring algorithms that scour social media networks to make determinations about potential candidates.
In my observation, concern about data privacy certainly lies towards the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. For a teenager in Amingaon, Guwahati who goes to a public school, usually only for the free mid-day meal, it might not be as important as for a graduate student at CMU who can afford to pay thousands of dollars to learn about data privacy. So I wonder who is more vulnerable to data not being private?
Mentioned in The Devastating Consequences of Being Poor in the Digital Age: Low-income Americans, and in particular, foreign-born Hispanic adults, are disproportionately reliant on mobile devices as their primary source of internet access.
Internet access allows for information download and upload, and that gives rise to a conversation, between the user and a server, sometimes asynchronous and sometimes live. Google Search would be an asynchronous conversation and Google Assistant would be a live one.
Mentioned in Google’s Sundar Pichai: Privacy Should Not Be a Luxury Good: Billions of people have trusted Google with questions they wouldn’t have asked their closest friends: How do you know if you’re in love? Why isn’t my baby sleeping? What is this weird rash on my arm?
I admire how much this non-living code can really know about what goes on in the minds of people. Information is not everything, but knowledge draws power, and that gives me mixed feelings.
However, it is reassuring to learn about company policies about the data that they collect. It is comforting to know that, in the case of Google, at least, these features are easy to find and have a good user experience.
Mentioned in Google’s Sundar Pichai: Privacy Should Not Be a Luxury Good: Google will never sell any personal information to third parties; and you get to decide how your information is used. Data makes the products and services you use more helpful to you. Products use anonymous data in aggregate to be more helpful to everyone. A small subset of data helps serve ads that are relevant and that provide the revenue that keeps Google products free and accessible.
I usually don’t mind data collection from certain companies, and Google is one of them. I have erased my Youtube history once or twice to stop the echo chamber, but apart from that I generally enjoy having a richer product experience that comes from Google’s learning algorithms. It feels reassuring to read about how a company uses my data.
However, I do understand that this is not enough for everyone. Some people that I know personally, are not comfortable with their data being shared anonymously. I know some people who don’t like relevant ads. It is not simple to determine someone’s comfort level with some technology learning about them.
Mentioned in What We’ve Learned From Our Privacy Project (So Far): Privacy is a complex, nebulous and constantly evolving issue, but amid the chaos and complexity, we have discerned four main themes: the ubiquity of surveillance and the ready availability of surveillance tools; our considerable ignorance of where personal data goes and how companies and governments use that data; the tangible harm of privacy violations; and the possibility that sacrificing privacy for other values (say, convenience or security) can be a worthwhile trade-off.
