Comments on: Privacy Trade-offs: Do People Not Care, or Simply Not Know?

By: jeremy

jeremy — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:26:38 +0000

I think it is actually pretty clear when you watch people’s general behavior, that their ‘privacy’ generally only really has concern in health information, financial information, and information about children, though the latter is to a lesser degree. i think the presumption that people care about privacy is just that, they say they do, then they don’t. do they shred or burn their financial documents? health documents? do they keep their personal information in a safe deposit box or a safe? i think the latter is… more people shred these days because they are afraid of identity theft, but that isn’t an issue of privacy for them, you can argue it is, but they are probably just afraid of loosing money. In short, i don’t think ‘user ignorance’ is an issue at all. I think humans just don’t ‘do’ privacy unless there is some other operant good like ‘money’ behind it, and then they aren’t really doing privacy either. I mean look at workplaces, they are gossip mills. Ask your parents if they told their coworkers about the health of their grandkids. … so… i think, that given human action in real life, which i think is parallel to online, privacy, is a misconception, a malconstruction, that tries to map some area in rights discourse that probably belongs to other concerns. The way to think about it is not, where should we have privacy, but ‘where don’t people want privacy and how don’t they want it?’ and i think from there, you’ll see they don’t actually want it at all amongst most of their important social relations, though they do want some culturally sustained barriers that vary situationally as norms.

By: Siva Vaidhyanathan

Siva Vaidhyanathan — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:38:22 +0000

You should design a large-scale survey of the awareness/practice issue. Supplement it with a some in-depth qualitative interviews. Everyone speculates about this. No one measures it.

By: Michael Zimmer

Michael Zimmer — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 02:20:22 +0000

You’re both hitting important themes that I left out of my original post (due to haste). Thanks for the comments.

By: philosoraptor

philosoraptor — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 02:10:12 +0000

Isn’t this also partly just an example of the more general point that all too often, you can’t infer much about people’s values by observing their behaviors? For example: there are probably some comparisons to be drawn here to the gap between the value that people assign to “being in good health”, on the one hand, and their actual diets/exercise habits/sleep schedule/etc. on the other hand.
(And then it’s further complicated because as Thierer himself says, “privacy” isn’t a unitary concept but a jumble of related ones. So, no wonder that people’s behaviors will seem out of sync with their stated concerns about “privacy”.)

By: David Brake

David Brake — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:36:18 +0000

My sense from my own thesis research is still more complex. Tech skills have a role but contextual awareness is also key. Ask someone who is reading their blog and they will give you a considered answer. But when they are writing they don’t always have a sense of the audience they know is there, and some may choose not to acknowledge to themselves the risks they face.