Privacy and Capitalism in the Age of Social Media

Sebastian Sevignani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317380382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores commodification processes of personal data and provides a critical framing of the ongoing debate of privacy in the Internet age, using the example of social media and referring to interviews with users. It advocates and expands upon two main theses: First, people's privacy is structurally invaded in contemporary informational capitalism. Second, the best response to this problem is not accomplished by invoking the privacy framework as it stands, because it is itself part of the problematic nexus that it struggles against. Informational capitalism poses weighty problems for making the Internet a truly social medium, and aspiring to sustainable privacy simultaneously means to struggle against alienation and exploitation. In the last instance, this means opposing the capitalist form of association – online and offline.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315674841-1

“You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy [. . .] settings. In addition [. . .]: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP [intellectual property] content that you post on or in connection with Facebook.”

(Facebook’s terms of use from June 8, 2012)

The quote from Facebook’s terms of use, which is one prototypical player in the corporate Internet, contains in essence the issues this book will examine. It concisely presents the property-privacy relations in informational capitalism that I describe as commodification. Throughout the following chapters I will advocate and expand upon two main theses: First, people’s privacy is structurally invaded in contemporary informational capitalism. And second, the best response to this problem is not accomplished by invoking the privacy framework as it stands. Both theses, as I will demonstrate, are connected by a critical notion of commodification. Privacy is subjected to a twofold commodification, namely practically and discursively. A critical notion of commodification, which I would propose, also normatively implies that there is a need to overcome commodification and to invent and support alternative forms to it.

The example of social media is used to demonstrate why I think the commodification of privacy is problematic. In contemporary informational capitalism, social media and social networking sites are places where privacy conflicts rise and culminate. By concentrating on social media and social networking sites we are therefore also able to learn about privacy and contemporary aspects of capitalism in general. Additionally, I will ground my theoretical discussion about the commodification of privacy in qualitative empirical research about social media users’ attitudes towards privacy and surveillance issues.

I understand this book as a contribution to a critical and dialectical theory of informational capitalism that is presently needed not only to understand the dynamics of new information technology and society but also to open up these dynamics for critical, conscious, and emancipatory political re-organisation. Within such broader theory and concern, the following chapters will substantiate a theoretical framework which I call the commodification of privacy in informational capitalism framework. Figure 1.1 pictures what will be elaborated and explained in detail. Capitalist profit interests broadly shape society and also the Internet (Fuchs 2008). These interests can contravene users’ needs to communicate and collaborate insofar as those needs can only be satisfied if they do not inhibit profit. Users’ needs principally are of secondary importance.

I think the well documented crisis of privacy in the digital age relates to this general problematic of capitalist societies. Economic aspects of surveillance that include the collection, storing, and processing of user and consumer data for economic and profit purposes are of particular interest to me. Economic surveillance is driven by the profit motive, which is itself powerfully grounded in the capitalist (right of) private property. In contrast to my critical analysis, public discussions and Internet users’ concerns are usually not about economic issues and profit interests; rather they are about privacy, which is frequently seen as the opposite of surveillance. Privacy and surveillance are seen as contradicting each other. Confronted by massive means of surveillance, the individual calls for protection, which the individual right to privacy seems to provide.

I will contend that the focus on privacy not only deflects from structural conflicts underlying the Internet and society, but that privacy also works as an ideology in favour of the status quo that is characterised by economic surveillance and profit interests. This is because the dominant concept of privacy, which is used as an argument against surveillance by many, is itself a motive of surveillance if one considers the broader picture. A closer analysis will show that the poles of the opposing pair, privacy and surveillance, are interconnected, insofar as both are related to private property in capitalism. And this assumption is consistent with observations made by others: “A society of strangers is one of immense personal privacy. Surveillance is the cost of that privacy” (Nock 1993, 1), and “in our nomadic world the society of strangers seeks privacy that actually gives rise to surveillance” (Lyon 2001, 27). According to Theodor W. Adorno, one epigone of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, “the conception of the contradictory nature of societal reality does not, however, sabotage knowledge of it and expose it to the merely fortuitous. Such knowledge is guaranteed by the possibility of grasping the contradiction as necessary and thus extending rationality to it” (1976, 109). What I want to do in the following chapters is exactly what Adorno suggests: extending rationality to the alleged contradiction between (economic) surveillance and privacy by pointing out their common ground in private property and their close connection to the process of commodification.

Figure 1.1The commodification of privacy in informational capitalism framework

The capitalist nexus of commodification, between private property, surveillance, and privacy, is also normatively challenged because it involves exploitation, social sorting, and exclusion, as well as alienation and heteronomy. Commodification is described as ultimately contributing to individual and social unfreedom. I consequently see the need for thinking about alternatives to it (indicated by the arrow towards the left in figure 1.1). Alternatives, I will argue, are emancipatory if they simultaneously leave behind the commodification-related problems of alienation and exploitation, and do justice to human individuality, which is the main theme of the privacy discourse.

1.1. The Structure and the Scope of the Book: Some Remarks

This book is divided into six chapters. The rest of the introduction clarifies my subject of investigation, namely I introduce a critical notion of commodification that serves as the foundation for the discussions in the following chapters and I explain what I understand as informational capitalism, a crucial but particular aspect of capitalist societies. The empirical study I conducted and which accompanies the theoretical discussions throughout the book is introduced and explained in chapter 2. Chapter 3 investigates the practical or economic-material commodification of personal data and privacy as it takes place in today’s (mainly) corporate Internet, which is driven by surveillance-based business models and causes the problems of exploitation and alienation. The chapter ends with the observation that there is a contradiction between the corporate Internet and users’ privacy and deduces that a closer analysis of the privacy concept is important. Chapter 4 presents a typology of existing privacy theories and summarises existing critiques of privacy. Chapter 5 contains my critical contribution to privacy theory; it describes the privacy discourse as a possessive individualistic discourse and tries to prove this assumption by engaging with privacy theories. Chapter 6 then presents a conclusion. Summarising my preceding line of argumentation in a nutshell, it proposes potential alternatives to the practical and discursive commodification of privacy in informational capitalism. Here, I introduce a notion of social privacy and investigate forms of an alternative, non-commercial Internet against this backdrop.

Privacy is a culture-sensitive concept. For instance, in Sweden it is culturally acceptable for everyone to know about wages that others earn; in Germany, however, financial privacy would prevent this. On the other hand, some authors (Moore 1984; Newell 1999; Westin 1967, 8) see a universal basis for privacy because the occasional condition of privacy has adaptive benefits for humans and provides the opportunity for biological and psychological system stabilization. What I think is universally worth sustaining is the potential for human individuation that is expressed in the discourse about privacy. However, what I am not convinced about is that the specific capitalist form of sustaining human individuality is the best possible practice available to us. It would be a mistake to identify the specific socio-historical form of privacy with any universal need for privacy. As I have made clear already I will analyse privacy in informational capitalism. Although privacy is clearly a culturally-specific value that is most influential in the Western world, and although I use material from an empirical study conducted in a Western country, I have not confined the title of the book to privacy in the Western world or at least in Western capitalism. Behind this decision lies the assumption that capitalism as a whole is a meaningful unit of analysis and that there is something which characterises capitalism as such, no matter where it geographically appears. Surely, the common denominator of any capitalist society must be something abstract, something that indeed can have culturally diverse appearances. The latter is stressed even within the Western world, for instance, between Europe and the United States (Whitman 2004). Whitman argues that “American privacy law is a body caught in the gravitational orbit of liberty values, while European law is caught in the orbit of dignity” (2004, 1163) and he consequently suggests that “we have to identify the fundamental values that are at stake in the ‘privacy’ question as it is understood in a given society. The task is not to realize the true universal values of ‘privacy’ in every society” (2004, 1220). Whitman also admits that there are similarities across societies as well but unfortunately he does not elaborate much on these similarities (for the difference between dignity and liberty in terms of privacy, see chapters 5 and 6). On the other hand, it is argued, for instance with reference to China that whereas privacy-distant ideas of collectivism are still dominant, there is also a gradual process of assimilation to Western concepts, theoretically in science and practically in everyday life (Yao-Huai 2005). Also, Greenleaf’s studies (2011; 2013) make the point that privacy is not only relevant in the Western world; rather the development of data privacy laws is accelerating, their geographical scope expanding, and their consistency increasing worldwide. Against Bennet and Raab (2006), who assumed incoherent and fragmented privacy legislation throughout the world, Greenleaf argues that at least what concerns existence and formal strength there is a unifying tendency on the globe. Thereby Europe’s data protection and privacy legislation have become a kind of global role model. It is interesting that Greenleaf relates the recognition of privacy in law to the economic power of a nation and the political form of democracy. Although I cannot prove that what I will say in this book about the concrete socio-historical form of privacy in capitalism applies to all capitalist societies, I would maintain that there is a global dominance of the Western world and capital owners’ interest in a global market. Some of my analysis will probably fit for all capitalist societies, and then there might also be a Western bias that totalises certain developments of privacy and private property that are only observable from my cultural standpoint. I would like to make a proposal to further deepen these considerations in discussion with others and I would like to invite others to prove that there is no capitalist unity in diversity. The work presented here, at least, does not follow a culturally comparative interest; rather it focuses on systemic aspects.

A second issue I want to address is the role that an investigation of the state plays in the book. At the time of writing this thesis, Edward Snowden, a former external contractor of the United States of America’s National Security Agency (NSA) revealed, by sharing secret documents and data with investigative journalists, the existence of previously unknown programs that aim at the extensive surveillance of global communication flows. Particularly the global Internet traffic was subject to these surveillance programs. The involved states, mainly the so-called Five Eyes—the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia—justify these surveillance programs by referring to the threat of global terrorism. In an interview with the British daily newspaper The Guardian, Snowden explained his motivation to become a whistle blower: “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things. . . . I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under” (MacAskill 2013). Up until now Snowden’s revelations have provided information, amongst other things, about the following surveillance programs:

• PRISM: According the documents provided by Snowden, the NSA is able to access server data from major Internet corporations, such as Google (e.g., Gmail), Apple, Microsoft (e.g., Skype), Facebook, and Yahoo. The involved corporations acknowledge that they only provide information to state institutions if there is a legal basis that demands their cooperation; however, there are discussions in the media about how far corporations cooperate voluntarily. As a response to PRISM alternative Internet services gained popularity. For instance, the web page PRISM Break (https://prism-break.org/) provides information about available alternative and free software to circumvent the known surveillance programs.
• ‘Tempora’ is the codename for a British security services program with the goal to monitor the globa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Empirical Study: Critical Social Research on Social Media
• 3 Privacy in Informational Capitalism
• 4 Privacy Theories
• 5 Privacy and Ideology
• 6 Alternatives
• Appendix