Unreasonably searching: Is privacy uncool, and are we cool with that?

When I was youngster, our house was on a party line with another house across the dusty gravel road. The phone would ring one long for our house, two short for theirs. You answered it if it was for you. You could pick it up at any time and hear—heck, participate in—the conversation of anyone else on the line. Party lines functioned on respect, the honour system, and general good-neighbourliness.

My 8-year-old conversations didn’t have a whole lot of scandalous content such as might impact my future personal brand, but it was a pretty weird situation. That level of personal space invasion would be intolerable today. Within the same household, within the same family we all have our own phones. We hold our communications cards close to our chest. I squint with suspicion when my iPod picks up next door’s wifi network. What kind of person names their network Afrosizzle?

Facebook’s been making some big headlines with their new privacy settings, which include forced exposure of some previously private stats (name, gender, home town, your list of friends). This is ostensibly to appease Canada’s Privacy Commission, although completely removing the ability to hide your associations and personal details can’t be what the ole’ CPC had in mind.

For the first time, I wonder if I want to continue being a part of Facebook. It’s very important to me socially, so I’ve been ignoring the privacy cost. I’m also irked that Facebook is quite transparently doing this in order make more money—the more publicly available data they have, the more valuable they are to advertisers. With Twitter raking in the “millions”, at least in terms of valuation, from its recent deals to allow search engines to index tweets real time, Facebook is chafing at the pesky penchant for privacy motivating its users to tie up their valuable information. For Facebook, increased user privacy is good public relations, but beyond that it’s not in their best interest.

It’s been suggested to me by a smart cookie that Facebook would be wiser to continue romancing its users at this point, because if people bail from the network, they lose everything. You can’t advertise to an empty room.

So it’s time to sit back with a cool glass of something socially acceptable and consider privacy. The immediate answer is: there’s no such thing in 2009. Hit What the internet knows about you and you’ll see an incriminating list of your proclivities, sufficient to paint quite the picture of what should be marketed at you (at the very least). A lot can be inferred from your digital trail. An MIT student study called Gaydar calculates who’s gay based on Facebook friends list. A quick self-Googling reveals an old resume available for download, posters of my artwork for sale (unauthorized and no cash coming to me, hmmm), and a list of every comment I’ve made on blogs under my own name. Enough for a decent writer to cook up an accurate character treatment (give me straight hair, though, please).

I’m not talking about privacy in terms of security, your credit card info, online banking username, that stuff. That needs to be protected or the online economy will collapse. With profit as a motive, you can be sure companies don’t want to be responsible for the thieving of your identity and will work to protect it. I’m talking about having people know who you really are. The vague and gnawing discomfort that everyone has access to the opinions and preferences, personal tidbits, stories and images that make up your individuality. It’s not that you lose these things by exposed, but you’re forced to own them. Check your Google dashboard…yup, right there are the Googledocs I thought I’d deleted. If these personal musings were indexed, it would be like the entire fourth grade reading your diary.

Privacy is a dying value, probably largely unbeknownst to we value-holders. The Fourth Amendment to the American Constitution, Section Eight of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights all single out privacy as necessary to human dignity, autonomy, democracy. And we’ve sold this fundamental social construct up the river so we can play Farmville.

Calling attention to this fact is not to say that I think there’s a solution. The domination of reality tv demonstrates our culture enjoys knowing the dirty details, and has paved the way for the 15 seconds of fame that accompany a much-commented status update. Society is going to evolve to accept that we are all now public figures. Act accordingly. Canada’s Privacy Commission exhorts our citizens on its blog to “consider how we conduct ourselves online and manage our personal information”, and that’s about all we can do. This aspect of digital literacy should be taught in elementary school, because it’s a very simple concept: you’re responsible for everything you say and do. Don’t click it if you don’t want to defend why you clicked it.

To ease the cold thrill of paranoia engendered by my self-Google, I suggest a digital closet-cleaning that includes:

1. Close any social network accounts that you don’t intend to update
2. Delete portfolios and resumes that are out of date
3. Send “update my info” email to places you’re listed that you want to remain
4. Send “please take down my copyrighted material” email to places that have indexed or stolen your stuff
5. Streamline & merge online identities to whittle yourself down to a representative persona
6. Create new content to bury the old

Can we give up the unlisted phone number that was our pre-Google life? The social value of privacy was that we could control who “they” thought we were by what we chose to reveal. How you dress, speak, act, and the details you offered to the public were yours to design. There’s an opportunity to craft your virtual persona even more carefully, but the effort involved in deception would suck a lot of the enjoyment out of online life. New users—the digitally native children of today—will just be themselves and not understand “none of your business”. It’s Gen X, the most active in social networks, who have haphazardly, naively and accidentally created their online selves, and who may feel pressure from the vestiges of a sense of modesty to clean up their early efforts.

And what if privacy does die? Is it an old fashioned notion, arousing blank stares and eye rolls from the tweens of today? Should we count on the tweens of today to define our culture? If we accept the end of privacy, do we doom democracy as well—the free practice of religion, the safety to vote for the government with whose ideals you agree, the liberty to hold and express opinions? The right—or even the ability—to maintain private opinions, beliefs and actions may disappear. Your phone will let us know where you are, and you will trade that for the convenience of location-aware pizza coupons.

It might make us more real, because we have to put our money where our mouth is when our opinions are indexed. It might let us relax, the truth setting us free and all that. I yam what I yam. Google me. We might be the last generation to feel dangerously exhibitionist when we commit to the flagrant public display that is a bumper sticker. (Anecdotally, it does improve my driving, lest strangers unfairly judge my kind to be jerky on the road.) We might just get sick of the whole thing and commit Web 2.0 Suicide, and move on from our great social experiment.

Culture is transforming now; the skeletons are being ousted from the closet, blogging about their time in there, and getting book deals. Barring a massive government crackdown on information flow, 30-somethings raised on the party line will need to become rather zen about being public figures. Let go of the notion of control. Just be yourself. Within reason.