“Get over it!” as Scott McNeeley said years ago about the end of privacy as we knew it is not the best advice. Only by understanding why it is gone and never coming back can we have a shot at rethinking what privacy means in the context of our evolving humanity.
Richard Thieme provides a historical and social context for some of that rethinking. He goes both deep and wide and challenges contemporary discussions of privacy to get real and stop using a 20th century framework.
Our technologies have changed everything, including us. We humans are loosely bounded systems of energy and information. We interact with other similar systems, both organic and inorganic, "natural" and "artificial." These “differently sentient systems” all consist of nodes in intersecting networks extending in several dimensions. We have always known we were like cells in a body, but we emphasized “cell-ness.” Now we have to emphasize “body-ness” and re-imagine who we have become.
What we see depends on the level of abstraction at which we choose to look. Patterns extracted from data are either meta-data or just more data, depending on the level of scrutiny. The boundaries we like to imagine around our identities, our psyches, our "private internal spaces," are violated in both directions, in and out, by symbolic data that, when aggregated, constitutes “us.” It's like orange juice, broken down into different states before recombination as new juice; it is reconstituted by others but still constitutes “us,” and we are known by others more deeply in recombination than we know ourselves.
To understand privacy - even what we mean by “individual human beings” who want it - requires a contrary opinion. Privacy is honored in lip service, but not in the marketplace, where it is violated or taken away or eroded every day. To confront the challenges generated by technological change, we have to know what is happening so we can re-imagine what we mean by privacy, security, and identity. We can't say what we can't think. We need new language to articulate our experience and grasp the nature of the context in which we live. Then we can take the abstractions of data analytics and Big Data down to our level.
The weakest link in discussions of privacy is the definition of privacy, and the definition of privacy is not what we think. But pursue the real at your peril: Buddhists call enlightenment a “nightmare in daylight.” Yet when the screaming stops, it is enlightenment, still, after all. That clarity, that state of being, is the goal of this presentation.