Towards an Articulation and Assemblage Theory of PIP A Dis

195 Pages·2014·0.66 MB·English

by  Lars Weise

The Politics of Personal Information Privacy for the Facebook Age – Towards an
Articulation and Assemblage Theory of PIP
A Dissertation
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY
Lars Weise
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Gilbert Rodman, Ph.D, adviser
May 2014
Copyright
Acknowledgement
“Culture is ordinary. […] We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole
way of life – the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning – the special processes
of discovery and creative effort.”
Raymond Williams, 1958
A dissertation is ordinary, too. Writing a dissertation is possible only because of the great
number of people, who make up our lives.
That is why I first thank my partner Hannah. Her willingness to live with me in a foreign
country, to never doubt the reasoning behind my plans, her strength and her courage to
engage even the most challenging situations, has been a daily inspiration.
During the last four years I could always count on my parents's unquestioned support for
this project, their patience and worldly wisdom. I own my confidence to them.
My gratitude goes to both Hannah's and my family for their love and support, especially
once our wonderful daughter Johanna Karlotta made focussing on academic work just a
little bit more challenging.
Finally, I would like to thank our friends in Minnesota for making our lives abroad
enlightening, fun, and enjoyable.
I was fortunate to benefit from the guidance and the acumen of a committee of
exceptional and accomplished scholars.
First, I thank my adviser, Gil Rodman, for his enduring support over the last four years.
His insightful comments and his careful advise made this dissertation possible. His
comprehensive, spot-on, and astute criticism has encouraged me to complete this
dissertation. Gil's guidance provided me the much needed intellectual freedom to come
up and carry-out a project that I truly own.
Thank you to my committee chair, Mary Varvus, for her keen understanding of the
intricate balance between academic commitments and commitments to family and
friends. Over the course of three years, Mary's calm advise has helped to transcend the
challenges that come with living 8000 miles away from your family.
I am grateful for Karen Ho's commitment to this project, for her insightful and
constructive critique. Karen's encouragement was of great importance when doubt
loomed large.
Finally, Laurie Ouellette's class “New Trends in Media Studies” has not only established
my personal litmus test for graduate coursework, but it also inspired many ideas that
shaped this dissertation. Laurie's critical interventions at various points in the process of
conceptualizing this project are much appreciated.
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Abstract
Located at the intersection of privacy studies, media studies, and cultural studies, this
dissertation challenges the notion of post-privacy and radical transparency. It argues for
the reinvigoration of the political dimension of personal information privacy and
challenges readers to scrutinize the ways in which journalists, politicians, Facebook
officials, and scholars alike make it more difficult for ordinary people to define and
negotiate for themselves the meaning and relevance of their personal information privacy.
The first chapter looks at seven years of journalistic reporting, Facebook's data use policy
as well as The White House Guidelines for Consumer Privacy. I argue that journalists,
Facebook officials, and politicians alike overemphasize individual user control and
technical options as solution to the complicated relationship between PIP and Facebook. I
criticize that journalists make no or only superficial attempts to connect Facebook's
privacy policy to larger contextual factors – either political, cultural, or economical. The
second chapter investigates the economic dimension of the PIP discourse and examines
more closely Facebook's SEC statements, Facebook's quarterly business reports as well
as other internal documents, and newspaper articles from the The Wall Street Journal and
Fortune Magazine. I argue that journalists provide a one-dimensional and trivializing
account of the economy. The chapter demonstrates how journalists and prominent
scholars help to perpetuate the myth of the technological sublime and, in so doing, render
themselves involuntary allies to Facebook's misleading rhetoric of individual user
empowerment.
The third chapter attempts to correct the mistakes above and suggests first steps towards
an articulation and assemblage theory of PIP. The chapter outlines how such a theory
relies on the ordinary and pragmatic tradition of cultural studies while simultaneously
introducing the notion of accountability for information. The final chapter applies the
articulation and assemblage theory of PIP to the college class room. It discusses the
foundations of a new PIP pedagogy, introduces a number of guidelines and exercises for
the classroom, and discusses a variety of readings that address the issue of PIP in a
network culture. The chapter culminates in a syllabus that is designed with a college class
room in mind.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements …................................................................... i
Chapter 1:
Introduction …........................................................................…... 1
Chapter 2:
Don't Blame the User – it's Context, stupid! …............................. 18
Chapter 3:
Politics of Privacy meet Shareholder Culture ….......................... 65
Chapter 4:
Towards an Articulation and Assemblage Theory of PIP ................ 103
Chapter 5:
Teaching PIP – Introducing a New Curriculum............................. 140
References …................................................................................. 182
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Introduction
In 1890, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis published an article for the
Harvard Law Review titled “The Right to Privacy” in which both authors contemplate the
relationship between communication technology and the basic civil right to privacy.
Warren and Brandeis were not the first to contemplate the conditions that shape our
expectations and tastes for privacy. However, their essay describes the beginning to what
would become a substantial body of literature about the legal dimensions of privacy. To
this day, their essay “The Right to Privacy” remains the second most-cited law review
article of all time1.
Roughly 125 years ago, Warren and Brandeis lamented how their right to be
alone and thus, their ability to execute the right to “exercise extensive civil privileges”,
was under the attack from a new technology – instantaneous photography – and a
burgeoning newspaper enterprise. The disruptive potential of new communication
technologies marked, Warren and Brandeis complained, “an invasion upon his (sic)
privacy, subjected him (sic) to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted
by mere bodily injury”2.
At the current conjuncture, some challenge Warren's and Brandeis's urgent plea
for the relevance of privacy. Sun Microsystems's CEO Scott McNealy's stated: “You have
1 Fred R. Shapiro and Michelle Pearse “The Most-cited Law Review Articles of all time” Michigan Law
Review 110. p.1489.
2 Samuel D. Warren and Louis D.Brandeis “The Right to Privacy” Harvard Law Review IV.5 1890.
<http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html>
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zero privacy anyway. Get over it”3. Others conclude that “privacy is dead”4. Finally,
Facebook's CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg proposes “radical transparency”5 as a
new paradigm eventually leading to a more “'open and transparent world', [where] people
will be held to the consequences of their actions and be more likely to behave
responsibly”6.
Yet another group of privacy skeptics suggest that the term post-privacy best
captures our contemporary relationship to personal information. The concept of post-
privacy has received much attention as it tries to capture, to struggle with, and to deal
with our alleged new information reality – assuming that we, indeed, live in such a new
context. The German post-privacy advocate Michael Seemann outlines the basic
principles of such an approach:
The concept of post-privacy understood is the realization that certain
assumptions, ideas, and expectations about privacy from the analogue world no
longer fit the new networked and digital world. Therefore, post-privacy is an
invitation to discuss these ideas and to formulate alternatives7.
This dissertation challenges the notion that post-privacy provides a meaningful
alternative and argues that it is too early to close the books on the concept of personal
information privacy. I acknowledge and discuss at length that the concept of privacy is in
and of itself “in disarray”8, highly “fractured, ambiguous, perhaps even incoherent”9.
However, I argue that the case study of Facebook makes clear how personal information
3 Quoted in Julie E.Cohen Configuring the Networked Self p.11.
4 Daniel J. Solove in his book Understanding Privacy provides a comprehensive overview of the many
claims about the alleged death of personal privacy. See pages 3 to 5 and for citation information notes
23 through 29.
5 Mark Zuckerberg quoted in David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect p.200.
6 Ibid.
7 Michael Seemann ctrl+verlust my translation March 23, 2011. <http://www.ctrl-verlust.net/was-ist-
postprivacy-fur-mich/>
8 Daniel J. Solove Understanding Privacy p.1.
9 Helen Nissenbaum Privacy in Context p.2.
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privacy has become one of the principle battlegrounds on which ordinary people exercise
(or refrain from) their right to negotiate their relationship to powerful institutions,
organizations, and individuals. I argue that simply moving on to post-privacy brackets
and, more dangerously, masks and trivializes the many political, cultural, and economic
issues at stake with regard to personal information privacy.
In other words, I agree with Warren and Brandeis, and understand personal
information privacy to be constitutive of who we are. Moreover, I consider PIP as
foundational to political and economic circumstances that are characterized by a more
equal distribution of power. However, in contrast to Warren and Brandeis, and many
other legal scholars, I am not so much interested in PIP as an individual right. Instead,
this dissertation is my attempt to develop an articulation and assemblage approach to PIP,
which looks at the connections between our tastes and expectations for personal
information privacy and broader issues of power distribution.
For example, the German information rights and IT lawyer Thomas Stadler argues
that leaving behind the concept of privacy does nothing for those who lack power. Quite
to the contrary, the powerful will continue to be in power and will actually use and abuse
their powers more excessively and unburdened than before. He furthermore states:
The corrective power of the personal right of every citizen, which is know in
Germany as the right of informational self-determination, will no longer exist.
Therefore, we have to disagree vehemently with the argument according to
which the concept of privacy is no longer good for the defense against
surveillance. Rather, the right to privacy is the only effective argument against
governmental surveillance.10
10 Thomas Stadler is a German information rights and IT lawyer warning against the “post privacy trap”.
His thoughtful observations can be accessed on his blog Internet Law. May 15, 2013.
<http://www.internet-law.de/2013/10/die-post-privacy-falle.html>
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Along these line, my articulation and assemblage theory of PIP is inspired by
some of the central principles of the cultural studies project, probably best summarized
by Lawrence Grossberg. He writes: cultural studies
is concerned with describing and intervening in the ways cultural practices are
produced within, inserted into, and operate in the everyday life of human beings
and social formations, so as to reproduce, struggle against, and perhaps
transition the existing structures of power.11
Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. Macgregor Wise second Grossberg and emphasize that
cultural studies is about “how inequalities of power are produced, maintained, and
transformed through culture” - always keeping in mind that culture is understood as “a
site of struggle [that] has a role in both reproducing inequality and challenging it”12.
The understanding of PIP, as an isolated phenomenon that exists independent
from contexts, cannot make these articulations visible. Such an apolitical understanding
of PIP leaves unanswered the important question about the relationship between personal
information privacy and power at the current conjuncture. Moreover, the notion of post-
privacy circumvents and leaves out critical debates that view PIP as the terrain, maybe
even battle ground, on which asymmetrical power relationships unfold and manifest.
Borrowing again from Lawrence Grossberg, what we need to do instead is to
investigate how people are empowered and disempowered by the particular
structures and forces that organize their everyday lives in contradictory ways,
and how their (everyday) lives are themselves articulated to and by the
trajectories of economic, social, cultural, and political power.13
I turn to cultural studies because we need a new way of thinking about personal
information privacy in a digital network culture; a way that takes into account that
11 Lawrence Grossberg Cultural Studies in the Future Tense p.8.
12 Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. Macgregor Wise Culture+Technology.A Primer. p.2.
13 Lawrence Grossberg Cultural Studies in the Future Tense p.8.
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personal information privacy is a “daily, managerial task”14, as anthropologist Catherine
Nippert-Eng points out. In other words, what we need is an approach that views PIP as an
ordinary cultural practice that is part and parcel of everyday life. Therefore, personal
information privacy is not isolated but embedded in culture.
As Julie E. Cohen makes clear, individuals do not act “autonomously outside of
culture” but “are constituted by social and political [and economic] cultures that surround
them”15. I propose that privacy and culture are inseparably linked, which leads to the
conclusion that personal information privacy is best understood as a site of struggle over
meaning, too. In other words, the challenge is not to understand personal information
privacy as justification for theories that take into account only individual actions. An
articulation and assemblage theory of PIP centers around the idea that individual agency
is always already restricted by structural conditions that shape our everyday lives. It is the
ongoing interaction between individual agency and structure that we need to look at if we
want to understand the new realities of personal information privacy in a networked
culture.
I argue, in addition to understanding personal information privacy as plural16,
contextual and relational17, and as “an interest in breathing room to engage in socially
situated processes of boundary management”18, we need a way to think about privacy that
focuses on the political, cultural, and economic, connections that become visible when
14 Katherine Nippert-Eng Islands of Privacy p.8.
15 Julie E Cohen Configuring the Networked Self. p.25.
16 In Understanding Privacy Daniel J. Solove establishes himself as the principle advocate of the idea that
privacy is an umbrella term that always already captures a plurality of issues.
17 In Privacy in Context Helen Nissenbaum insists that people are primarily concerned with the integrity
of information contexts.
18 Julie E.Cohen Configuring the Networked Self p.149.
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