There’s a big gorilla in the room and nobody wants to talk about it. While doing research last night I bumped on a great article by Joe Andrieu “Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing“. In his article Joe states that, among other things, “Privacy as secrecy is dead”. My friend Andrew, in a response to my article “Identity Genome” from yesterday, said “Not sure that privacy, as we have defined if prior to and even into the information age, is even feasible.”. That’s one of the very first ‘online’ responses I got on my website and I’ve been banging my head against the wall asking myself the question “Why do people not have anything else to say on the issue?”
the gorilla in the room is an expression describing a big and important subject/problem that is on everyone’s mind but no one is willing to bring it up. Usually when people are in denial as a group and not willing to face a harsh reality.
Said headbanging had me asking myself the questions “Do I not write entertaining enough?”, “Do I not put sufficient mild provocation into my articles?”, “Do I write in a way that either you agree with or you don’t?”, “Should I or should I not include a poll in my article?” or…. “Do people feel that privacy is indeed already dead?”. It seems like getting people to engage into any discussion on the subject itself is aching to asking people to “give up your privacy already and show me your opinion on the subject!”.
Meanwhile I’ve been getting some steady feedback, through email what else, on the quality of my articles. It is clear that most of my articles on the subject of IdM (Identity Management) are fairly long and this is intentional. If it took a lot of effort to write it should take a lot of effort to read. Most of the people that finish reading to the end seem to share the opinion that they’re well written articles but people who think they really suck are not likely to let me know; They just click on the next link and off you go. I’ve removed some polls in articles that had a tendency to “lead the horse to the water” based on some of the feedback I’ve been getting, so mea culpa, sometimes I tried to make the horse drink the water as well. The good feedback I’ve been getting so far however has already led me to believe that I don’t suck completely as a beginning writer but there’s something else going on here, the “Paradox of the Privacy“.
The Paradox of the Privacy
An interesting reality is that the feedback I’ve been getting on my articles typically involves feedback from those people that are interested in, and passionate about, privacy. Not everybody fully understands the difference, well in my forming opinion that is, between privacy and anonymity. As I wrote about before in Privacy vs. Anonymity, I believe that privacy is about freedom of choice and anonymity is a subset of privacy where the choice is not to volunteer any information about yourself; When asked for certain private information you’re asked to share this information with the receiver of that information. When your doctor asks you if you’ve been having urinal problems lately you will most likely share this information voluntarily because, as Joe Andrieu also states, “privacy isn’t about information we keep secret. It is about information we have revealed to someone else with expectation of discretion”.
So what if we solicit a response on identity management or privacy from people who are clearly interested on the subject as they’re reading the article? Well the people who are interested in privacy are frequently interested in it because they realize they have or should have, and in my opinion must have, a choice to share information, in this case information about their opinion on the subject of privacy.
If I’d write an article on something like ‘money’, the people who would be reading my article would most likely be interested in money. People who are interested in money typically, at the risk of generalizing, like money. If in this article I would ask people to give me their money they are likely to respond ‘uhhh I don’t think so!!’ as they like their money and want to keep it.
The Harsh Reality
I’m starting to believe somewhat that the ‘harsh reality’ in the quote above may indeed be that most people realize that privacy as secrecy is indeed dead. That’s the big gorilla in the room that nobody wants to discuss and face the consequences of. I Googled ‘privacy’ and was led to the Dutch wikipedia at first. On this page I read, freely translated, that:
One of the definitions of totalitarism is that the separation between the private and public life fades
Interestingly this reference was nowhere in the English wikipedia but I shall leave cultural differences untouched at this moment. I believe that, clearly, we can say that the internet as a whole is debit to this fading separation between our private and our public life. People use the internet on a day to day basis, and realizing that some of their data is already ‘out there’ in a way they cannot change at all (the IP address that you share with your internet service provider) they lower more and more thresholds and share more and more information about themselves.
So why do people still hang on to a gut feeling that sharing their opinion on the subjects of identity management and privacy is something they, either intuitively or by choice, do not do? In Dutch we have a term ‘struisvogelpolitiek’ (ostrich politics). This term can best be translated to English as ‘see no evil, hear no evil, there IS no evil’ because as the fable has it, the ostrich will bury his head in the sand when confronted with danger, thinking it can no longer see the danger and therefore the danger will not see it. I get a lot of visitors to my site through facebook as I frequently share links to my articles with my friends there. Are the friends participating in a ‘sharing personal information activity‘ on facebook likely to be interested in aspects acknowledging the danger of sharing information? Well look at how many comments you will see showing up under this article from facebook users and you have your answer. Are the people that read my articles through other sources going to react on this article? I think not because they realize they have a choice.
So where does this leave yours truly, sharing information voluntarily on facebook and many other social networks but still writing many detailed articles on the subject of identity management and privacy? That’s a good question indeed 
Update: Are you passionate about the subject of privacy? Please join our effort to Find a Project name and Win a Poken!
Here are other articles in the Identity Management series:
