A Feminist Take on Information Privacy
Maria Farrell has a really interesting framing of information/device privacy:
What our smartphones and relationship abusers share is that they both exert power over us in a world shaped to tip the balance in their favour, and they both work really, really hard to obscure this fact and keep us confused and blaming ourselves. Here are some of the ways our unequal relationship with our smartphones is like an abusive relationship:
- They isolate us from deeper, competing relationships in favour of superficial contact—’user engagement’—that keeps their hold on us strong. Working with social media, they insidiously curate our social lives, manipulating us emotionally with dark patterns to keep us scrolling.
- They tell us the onus is on us to manage their behavior. It’s our job to tiptoe around them and limit their harms. Spending too much time on a literally-designed-to-be-behaviorally-addictive phone? They send company-approved messages about our online time, but ban from their stores the apps that would really cut our use. We just need to use willpower. We just need to be good enough to deserve them.
- They betray us, leaking data / spreading secrets. What we shared privately with them is suddenly public. Sometimes this destroys lives, but hey, we only have ourselves to blame. They fight nasty and under-handed, and are so, so sorry when they get caught that we’re meant to feel bad for them. But they never truly change, and each time we take them back, we grow weaker.
- They love-bomb us when we try to break away, piling on the free data or device upgrades, making us click through page after page of dark pattern, telling us no one understands us like they do, no one else sees everything we really are, no one else will want us.
- It’s impossible to just cut them off. They’ve wormed themselves into every part of our lives, making life without them unimaginable. And anyway, the relationship is complicated. There is love in it, or there once was. Surely we can get back to that if we just manage them the way they want us to?
Nope. Our devices are basically gaslighting us. They tell us they work for and care about us, and if we just treat them right then we can learn to trust them. But all the evidence shows the opposite is true.
EDITED TO ADD (9/22) Cindy Cohn echoed a similar sentiment in her essay about John Barlow and his legacy.
Phill Hallam-Baker • September 20, 2019 11:14 AM
Its an interesting analysis that ties in with a theory I have been developing that rather than looking on bullying behaviors as only being problematic when they are motivated by racism, misogyny, etc. we should consider the bullying behavior as being the primary cause.
I am reminded of the (few) interactions I have had with Stallman. He was a classic abuser in that he forced everyone he interacted with to do so on his terms. He would be extremely unpleasant to you if you dared question his peculiar assumptions. And like Trump he could drop into a debate, throw a few punches at people or companies whose behavior he disliked and then fly off knowing that his supporters would continue harassing the target on their behalf after he had left.
Looking back at slavery, most people can see that the ‘justification’ for slavery given by the slave owners was merely a rationalization for protecting their economic interests (and worse). The need for slavery was the premise, not the conclusion. I think it is the same with racism. The problem of racism is not the small number of people who go round spouting pseudo-scientific rationalizations for their behavior, it is the much larger number of casual racists who act on unexamined prejudice or because they can.
Trump didn’t go up to women and thrust his hands into their vaginas because that gave him a pleasurable sensation. He assaulted the women because it was unpleasant to them. He assaulted them because he is a bully and their distress gave him the only faint glimmers of feeling he ever experiences. And the people who support Trump’s behavior passing it off as locker room talk are not doing it because they want to be believed but because they are bullies and they know that this behavior will upset people and making people angry and upset is what makes them feel powerful.
The big problem I have with this approach is that I have on numerous occasions seen abusers weaponize complaints procedures to use them for abuse. As with any security problem, it is one that can be easily solved if you assume that it is the only problem and the mechanism you are proposing won’t be exploited for abuse.