“Personal
data protection in the network society”
by Paloma Baytelman
[“Protección de
datos personales en la sociedad de redes"]
Book: Expansiva:
Reflexiones sobre el Uso y Abuso de los Datos Personales en Chile.
Santiago, Chile,
March 2011. Andros Editores.
Translated by
Paloma Baytelman and Eric Williams
I.
Introduction
The age of
information and knowledge brings deep transformations. We are facing some of
the most important cultural changes experienced by the humanity since the invention
of the printing press. Today, technology affects daily life in many ways, from
how we work, learn, consume and how we interact with brands, institutions,
governments and even our peers. Thanks to this technology, participation,
collaboration and creation of contents have become common daily practices,
generating new contexts and social construction formats.
In his book “Get
Back in the Box” Douglas Rushkoff points out that, “the Internet is not a
technological or even a media phenomenon: it is a social phenomenon”. If this
is still hard to understand for some people, it is because they continue to
believe that technology and media are tools that serve to control and
manipulate people, when in fact, these tools are serve to empower individuals.
Now people can create, transform and share contents, through which also they
build, reshape and share their identity. Thus, the large amount of information
available today in digital media platforms, plus the recent cultural changes –produced in part because of the
technological advances- brings more complex scenarios, while at the same time,
disrupts paradigms.
One of the most
profound changes that arise from these new dynamics is related to people’s
privacy. This is a not a topic up for discussion, nor something with which we
would be able to oppose: changes in privacy and personal data are a reality,
and are happening here and now. “The Age of Privacy is over”, Mark Zuckerberg
said in January 2010 referring to the controversial changes in privacy settings
in Facebook, the social network he founded by in 2006, and that today has more
than 500 millions of people registered around the world.
Rather than argue
over the idea of whether privacy is at an end, it is important to view this
issue from two perspectives, that is, as a change and a challenge. The first
approach -change- is related to the accelerated process of transformation of
the paradigms that have so far established the boundaries between public and
private. The challenge, therefore, relates to the importance of educating
people and societies of their responsibility regarding data protection, in
contexts where the possibility of control is far from absolute.
Both change and
challenge bring many questions regarding the responsibility of individuals, governments,
institutions, enterprises, social networking and many other diverse social and
technological structures.
While this
emerging technology, and all its social implications, may be surprising and
even overwhelming for some who are experiencing it, for the generation born
into these changes, or digital natives, these are natural issues. In fact, more
complex questions about the opportunities and risks of new technology appear
when analyzing the situation of these children and adolescents. Questions regarding
the construction of identity, privacy, personal data protection and the flow of
information, are issues that are only now beginning to be analyzed in some
academic fields and are still a long way from mobilizing the creation of public
policies or regulatory frameworks that are necessary to respond to the current
settings characterized by these changing scenarios.
II.
From immigrants to natives
As
information becomes more important, it becomes valuable as a currency. How we
access, handle, filter and share it are parameters that reveal our abilities to
understand the world and to manage our existence in it.
In this era
of knowledge boundaries are marked not only by how much we know about it or how
we learn the new skills, but also by how intuitive the new environments are to
us.
While the digital
natives have grown up with remote controls, video games, computers and the
Internet, cell phones, and interactivity as natural elements of their
environment, the rest of us are moving in the dark, sometimes even blind, like
immigrants in lands of participation. No matter how much we can learn to adopt
this technology, use these platforms and understand these new languages, we are
still immigrants of the previous world, cannot hide our accent, and thus remain
present in different ways.
Many digital
immigrants educated in the previous models are more cautious about what they
share, their reputation and private life. They are more afraid about what other
people might say about them and have more awareness about the consequences of
their acts. Natives instead, seem to have another perception about the meaning
of privacy and aren’t as concerned about the consequences of their acts on the
network.
According to Danah
Boyd, an American researcher, digital natives feel their bedrooms don’t belong
to them; they don’t perceive them like private spaces. Their bedrooms are only
another room in their parent’s house which everybody can access. Paradoxically,
the Internet provides them with a more private place where they can build their
own world and identity, or worlds and identities. Digital natives give great
value to the tremendous diversity of places where they can belong and where
they can both establish and share their private lives.
In this
sense, digital natives feel protected in this virtual context: they share their
lives there without thinking about the consequences, both present and future,
of what they say, what they share, who can see it, and how what they share will
remain accessible for many years.
Beyond generational
differences, such as being more or less cautious, presently, both native and
immigrants share large volumes of personal information on social networking
platforms to communicate, entertain, or simply to share contents. What is often
overlooked is how this information is like a currency; technological tools that
seem to be free are, after all, businesses that should be financed and that the
traded good are precisely the data and content that people generate and
exchange.
In this context,
many questions arise: How far are we willing to share our private data in order
to have access to sharing platforms? Are children and teenagers informed enough
about the limits and scope of data they share and the filters about the
identity information? These are only some of the questions we need to think
about before we act.
III.
Internet as a tatoo
What happens to our
personal data once we share it online? This question is generating a growing
concern, especially among digital immigrants. They see how younger people share
an overwhelming quantity of information through collaborative platforms. The
truth is that when information is exchanged in those platforms – through text,
pictures, videos or sharing personal data - its important to be aware that the
information might, sooner or later, become public. No matter how much an
individuals privacy setting have been adjusted, if one friend or contact
decides to take any of those elements to share, it can quickly become out of
that individuals control.
If a 30 yea old
person regrets having a tattoo he or she had done ten years ago, he or she can
try to remove it with laser technology, but the mark is going to stay forever.
With the information we share on the Internet something similar happens, and yet,
the situation is more complex. Interacting through the network seems to be
something natural and less painful than getting a tattoo, yet it lasts longer
and is even more visible.
In the case of the
digital natives, from these new tattoos arise more complex situations,
precisely because of practices of digital behavior and understanding about
public and private. Thus, a picture or a video that in the moment is fun, may,
a couple years later, prove to be compromising material in a work or family
environment.
Regardless of
whether they are aware of it or not, the elements that make up the identity
that people build for themselves on the network, exposes them to receive
unwanted solicitations, as well as runs the risk of various hazards, ranging
from identity theft to harassment from others.
Facing this
reality, one gets nothing by denying, criticizing and opposing digital tools,
because it is clear that we are facing a social phenomenon that transcends
merely technological aspects.
The challenge is to
create literacy models that allow to people to be prepared to use these new
platforms, while protecting their own integrity.
IV.
Virtual identity
According a
2010 Internet study done by a marketing research company, Comscore, 81% of
people in Latin America that use the Internet have an account in some social
networking platform. That percent is estimated to be concentrating especially
in Facebook profiles, a social network that in Chile has more than 7 million
users. Because of the extensive use of this platform, that in theory doesn’t
allow anonymity, it represents one of the best scenarios to examine the ways
that people go about creating their own identity in the digital world.
“Facebook’s value
is focused in interpersonal relations, tightly bound in the real world”,
according to the researchers Ignacio Uman, Carolina Venesio y Nataly Medina, of
Universidad de Buenos Aires, that together with the professor Alejandro
Piscitelli have been studying the scope of this social network platform and its
repercussion in the building of virtual identity.
“Facebook
integrates both offline and online life, the public profile with the real
identity. It takes footprints from real and makes it present in the virtual,
and vice-versa, blurring those environments that allow to play with identity
and the chance to reinventing that seemed to be a characteristic from the
online relations in mid 90’s. Nevertheless, virtual and real are not opposite
worlds, but layers of the same reality. It is no longer possible to confront
these two worlds, because these virtual environments are part from our real
life. In this scenario, seems that Facebook is doing a strong emphasis in the
real identity (more than virtual) of people, unlike what happened with the boom
of chat, forums and roll playing games, where every person invented his or her
avatar”, they explain.
Thus, we find
ourselves in an non-anonymous environment where identity seems to imply an
acceptance of others, leaving little room for behavior that might be perceived as
transgressive.
V. Anonymity and
oblivion
Today the Internet
accumulates an unimaginable amount of information whose number grows
exponentially each day, being fed by millions of people for whom the web and
particularly social networking platforms have become almost indispensable tools
of communication.
However, many
people don’t want the things they share on the web to be related to their real
identity or prefer to delete every sign of their existence in those platforms.
This fear may exist because of political, working or economic consequences,
harassment or even situations that can be life threatening.
People that
denounce uncomfortable truths to governments or enterprises, like human rights
activists in their struggle against repressive regimes, parents who try to
create a safe way for children to explore website content, victims of domestic
violence who want to rebuild their lives without their abusers being able to
track them; all of these users may prefer to use pseudonyms to communicate on social
networking platforms.
As indicated by the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, both for these individuals and for those
organizations that support them, anonymity is a critical issue of security
because it literally can save their lives.
Thus,
anonymity stands as an important part of the right to freedom of expression,
allowing the dissidents to protect their identities while expressing their
views.
Because the
Internet provides an important place in the struggle for democracy and social
injustice, the right to anonymity is central in the networking world.
It should be
remembered then that although there are some social networking platforms that
maintain a hidden identity, other wide-ranging like Facebook ask people to
provide information like their name, sex and geographic location. But what if
beyond wanting to be anonymous, we want to disappear from the web and erase the
traces we have left voluntarily during the time we have used the Internet and
social networking?
In spite of the
fact that there are rules designed to protect the reputation of individuals
and, in theory, one could ask for all ones personal information to be removed
from the Internet, in the practice, the right to forget has proved
almost impossible to enforce in the Internet. The right to forget is unfeasible
in an hyper interconnected context. This is why it is vital to be extremely
careful with the information, data and images provided, in order to protect the
privacy of such information and prevent its use for purposes for which it has
not been authorized.
VI. The
end of the secret
New technologies of
information and communication allow and drive positive practices and more
participatory and transparent scenarios. Nevertheless, for many people not
fully aware of the implication of sharing their data, more complex and
potentially dangerous environments appear.
Knowing
this, to demonize the platforms is not the best way to avoid these threats.
While social
networks are environments specially created to share information, it is
important that the practices of delivery and exchange of personal data do not
refer only to the digital sphere. Deciding where and with whom we share our
data are parameters on which we make decisions not only on the online world,
but also every day in our lives offline.
We need to
understand that the world changed and remember we are not talking about
technology, but what people do with it. Today almost anyone can take a picture
or a video and upload it to the Internet. So, it is not real to pretend that a
government or social networks administrators can control in an absolute way
what personal information or others information people share in the network.
Also, as was
mentioned before, is necessary to be conscious that all we share in the web can
be potentially found and indexed by search engines. No one is free from this,
not even governments or big corporations. One good example is the case of
WikiLeaks, organization that since 2006 has published in its website reports
and leaked documents containing sensitive matters of public interest, mainly
related with the reporting of unethical behavior of governments and businesses
around the world.
While our e-mails
or other information shared on the web are surely far from the global
importance that have been shown from some of the Wikileaks publications, these
events demonstrate how easy it is to decipher even the most confidential
documents, and is evidence of what can become the boundaries of right to
information and privacy.
This is why is so
important that people think about the type of data they are providing or
sharing and the future consequences that could happen because of make available
this material.
While the
government and legal institutions play an important role protecting the privacy
of individuals, is not part of the role of the institutions to secure the type
of information that individuals voluntarily choose to share on the network. It
is therefore essential that they are able to monitor themselves what they do on
the site, control what data they share with public agents, private, and even
with their closest circles.
What we do in the
Internet is not an isolated phenomenon; it is a social practice that is
articulated through the collective. While there are risks, changes, questions
and challenges, there are also, as never before in history, opportunities to
create value through the free circulation of data and the joint construction of
knowledge. The most important thing is that we educate ourselves to prepare for
all of this.
Bibliography
● Agencia
Española de Protección de Datos; Instituto Nacional de Tecnologías de la
Comunicación, S.A. (INTECO). “Estudio sobre la privacidad de los datos
personales y la seguridad de la información en las redes sociales online”
(Spain), 2009.
● Boyd,
Danah. “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics”.
Berkeley University (United States), 2008.
● ComScore.
“Estado de Internet en Latinoamérica”. www.comscore.com, 2010.
● Electronic
Frontier Foundation. “Anonymithy”. https://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity.
● Piscitelli,
Alejandro. “Nativos Digitales. Dieta cognitiva, inteligencia colectiva y
arquitecturas de la participación”. Santillana (Argentina), 2009.
● Rushkoff,
Douglas. “Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out”. HarperCollins
Publishers (USA), 2005.
● Shirky,
Clay. “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”.
Penguin Books (England), 2008.
● Tapscott,
Don. “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World”.
McGraw-Hill (USA), 2009.