I'll be honest: when I first enrolled in this course, I expected to hear a lot more about Snowden, the NSA and government surveillance – and at first I was disappointed. To be fair, we did discuss government surveillance: Zimerman, for example, talks about the impact that the Patriot Act had on libraries. I think that Snowden's disclosures are incredibly important, that the actions taken by the complicit US government agencies are alarming, and that these actions deserve to be the subject of public scrutiny, debate and criticism. Again, honesty - fear of government surveillance doesn't carry any kind of weird nostalgia for me: I am worried about it, right now, and I think that it the impacts on personal privacy could have serious consequences for everything from civic engagement to fair process.
BUT. I'm not at all unhappy that we didn't talk about it in specifics all that much. The coverage of the NSA wiretapping scandal is everywhere. Like, here’s some, and here and here and here and some over here and also here and here’s one about Edward Snowden. What’s being done, what’s not, who’s winning what prizes for the coverage, what do we know about Edward Snowden. I don’t mean to trivialize the effort and the courage that it must have taken to cover this story. As I said, I think it’s important. But at the same time, this is a story that is constantly in the press, and not always in a way that it is informative, or takes a broad view of the issue of privacy in networks or privacy online. Some of it is well written and thoughtful, and a fair amount of it isn’t.
I’m glad instead that we got a chance to focus on surveillance in ways I had never thought of surveillance. Coming from an economics background, I’d never heard of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon – only that he was a fan of usury. Likewise, I’d never thought of really thought about the work that databases do as constitutive: they don’t just store cryptic little bits of information, but that they actually create us as they store disparate pieces of information about our personhood (Poster). Likewise, I’d never really thought about how technology and biology can fuse to both feed those panoptic databases and (RFIDs, Taylorism/efficiency).
As we worked through these issues and others, and I continued to read through media articles related to privacy, I began to feel more and more that coverage was slanted in just one direction. Like there was a flood of articles about the NSA and government surveillance, and much, much less about privacy as it exists for people interacting with and through private sector entities. Sure, there’s been a lot of interesting stuff about Google, such as Vaidhyanathan’s book and a number fun and clever things like this meme and this movie. But I feel that a critical look at what the industry is doing generally, and accurate and thoughtful reporting on some of this stuff is lacking. After this course, I have to ask myself why, given the mountain of personal information that allow these entities to collect.
There’s one more reading I’d suggest, if anyone has the time or willpower to read anything else over the break, it’s Helen Nissenbaum’s “Privacy as Contextual Integrity”. If anyone’s been asking themselves “but what is this privacy thing anyway?”, fear not! Helen Nissenbaum has an answer for you. Plus, I think it’s well written and a pretty quick read.
Well, if I’m going to be really honest, I took this course because two friends were taking this course and it sounded kind of cool and I realized our schedules wouldn’t have anything in common if I didn’t take it. No regrets.










