A Twist of the Coronavirus Privacy Crisis — New Lows in Privacy
The following blog post, written by Yong Jin Park, explores some of the quotidian privacy implications of responses to COVID-19.
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The coronavirus hits everywhere. And one of the hardest hits came upon our basic sense of privacy, as in the past few months the coronavirus ended privacy as we know it. That is not the whole story, however. I am not talking about a sudden fame of Zoom and its security concerns. Privacy online was long gone even before Covid-19, and privacy invasion has been a normal part of ordinary people’s lives deeply rooted in social media digital platforms. And today, among people with some college education, it is almost common sense that popular search engines track our locations; Facebook knows our friends; and a ride-sharing service like Uber keeps records of our frequent daytime trips to local restaurants. But the end of privacy that befell us over the past few months is profoundly different. And this is why.
First of all, locational surveillance. Actually, this is not the problem any longer. Everyone knows exactly where you are most likely to be at this moment — home.
Everyone knows exactly where you are most likely to be at this moment — home.
So the problem is the opposite. The precision of whereabouts of your next moves is not a major concern. Instead, everyone’s location data became so transparent because we’re physically stuck with one static point of a daily life — albeit temporarily. This ‘everyone-at-home’ factor twists our sense of privacy. Leaving this morally obliged place called home requires legal justifications (up to a foreseeable future), but it also carries suspicion or even, in some cases, stigma associated with a low-skill job status that cannot be performed online or simply at a desk.
When stuck inside, the new lows of privacy get more serious. Your partner, spouse, or children are now staying at home altogether at the same time. So they are involuntarily eavesdropping on online meetings hurriedly set up to replace face-to-face conferences. With that, unless you have a large house or space where you can isolate (and social-distance) yourself, a moment of personal humiliation, subordination by a bossy team captain, shouting matches among colleagues, or even workplace bullying — all you rarely share with your family — is shared. That is an awkward moment of digitally-mediating social gathering that’s meant to be private, but compressed physical spaces exacerbate the blurring lines between private and public. Worse yet, background showings in virtual meetings via Zoom, for instance, offer a glimpse of the economic status of each participant (huge living room sofas, a tiny bedroom, nicely built-in bookshelves, a luxurious kitchen, etc.).
My point is that not everyone can equally manage privacy with sudden spatial compression begetting new lows of privacy, and the time of a crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic makes this difference more palpable than before. This is why the Coronavirus crisis is a crisis of privacy, as much as it is about surveillance of one’s status.
In fact, privacy protection from outside surveillance became harder at home, as much as it became harder to guard privacy inside home. For the purpose of a thought experiment, imagine a situation: Your boss sets up an emergency virtual team meeting over the weekend. She probably sent you an email invitation requiring everyone’s participation. The reason is legitimate: This is an unprecedented time of a crisis that needs urgent attention. Surely, any worker — employed at organizations — would know this crisis is not routine, but exceptional.
But as we do not know when this crisis will end (physically or mentally), an employed worker can hardly refuse such demands that require separate time commitment and are likely to collapse a tiny moment of home sanctity. Choosing alternative channels of interaction for better privacy triggers frowning from colleagues. Even seemingly benign email messages sent late at night will pressure a subordinate to respond. A new normal is to expect workers to avail virtual ‘selves’ continuously (synchronously and asynchronously) since they are at home at all times with internet connections. The trouble is that the right to set up the virtual gathering in a very private space, which used to be congruent with private times, is reserved for very few in statuses higher than yours.
Simply put, you do not have the power to carve out spaces for privacy at your home and whim.
I am not even discussing the digital divide whereby American residents in rural areas access the internet with a shaky physical connection that prevents them from engaging in the PET (privacy enhancing technologies) or smart encryptions. I am not discussing the concern about Corona-infected patients and their mobile data either, as in some nations like China and South Korea, the sacrifice of locational privacy for public health tracking is justified without much policy debate about due process. What’s at stake with new lows of privacy — as we witness a sudden flood of virtual interactions with weak and strong ties of colleagues, friends, and families — is banality. Instead of an obvious violation, privacy intrusion has become subtle and mundane with the privacy of daily lives turned up-side down, and it is slowly seeping among ordinary people when they do have reasonable privacy expectations, online skills, and decent digital connections.
In the late 1960s, sociologist Erving Goffman noted that humans are wired to perform different self-presentations in public and private. This is like a symbolic defense system built-in ourselves to survive by maintaining the safe distance between our private ‘selves’ and others. Oddly, social distancing imposed at the Coronavirus crisis creates unexpected consequences of collapsing sanguine distances within and across homes. As much as strict regulatory stipulations for surveilling Coronavirus patients’ mobile location are needed in each nation, it will be soon that each organization realizes it should’ve established clear guidelines about how it will protect the privacy of their office workers, staff, mangers, and all those with their jobs transformed into virtual ones at catastrophic emergency.
And note: privacy has always been harder for ordinary people to keep because privacy is tied to societal circumstances, and ordinary people are not the ones who tend to set up official private-public boundaries. The Covid-19 pandemic might be forcing us to see a glimpse of how privacy will be a precious commodity when the virtual-only world arrives. Imagine what our privacy will look like at a time of another global catastrophe like altered climate environments where no one can go outside. We are having a real-time real-world privacy experiment. Before new lows of privacy become a norm in future virtual environments, this will be the precise time to go back to our basic sense of normalcy as if we lived in any other normal times and know that for some, the deficiency of privacy hits harder. Does anyone remember two months ago? In those old days, as Goffman observed, we knew how to deal with privacy violations, more or less. That is how we put the genie back to the bottle.
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Yong Jin Park, School of Communications, Howard University
