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Introduction
A Moment in Time and Our Self-Identity Dilemma
Over the course of our lives, we experience moments that have the power to bring us sudden clarity and insight over aspects of our lives that we had misunderstood, misinterpreted, or simply failed to notice. As a global society, we are equally exposed to moments of collective revelation that fracture the status quo, opening new perspectives and courses of action. These are not necessarily moments of historical magnitude and can be as mundane as the last day of April 2019.
It was the day of the Facebook F8 developer conference, an event dedicated to tech creators and consumers, where the company usually introduces its latest technological updates, pitching product novelties or proprietary tools to reaffirm its position as leader and innovator. The edition of 2019 announced itself to be remarkably different. Facebook had been under a long siege following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Since the reveal of Facebook’s part in one of the biggest political campaign schemes of our times, the accusations toward the company had been cascading. In retrospect, the known offences fell under at least three categories. First, there were the unintended errors in personal data handling. Various bugs allowed the hacking of 30 million accounts in September 2018 or the open availability of the private photos of almost seven million users to third-party developers in December 2018 (Lapowsky 2018). Then, there was the intentional third-party data sharing. In December 2018, Facebook’s alleged secret deals with over one hundred and fifty major companies, among which Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix, were made public. Under these contracts, Facebook was deceitfully unlocking the private data of users for its partners’ use (Dance et al. 2018). Finally, there was the lenience towards the use of the platform, allowing for the spread of fake news, hate speech, or the congregation of individuals and groups with a shady agenda, leading to tragedies such as the violent street riots targeting Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (Lapowsky 2018). The company’s image had been suffering hit after hit, culminating in Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before US Congress. In 14 years since the creation of Facebook – the online social network that changed the way individuals interact and engage in social relationships worldwide – this was the first significant attempt to define and attribute accountability. Zuckerberg’s unprecedented testimony was interpreted in many ways at the time. What is nevertheless visible to anyone watching the recording on YouTube is that it evokes both humanistic intentions and unsettling acts of power. By F8, the list of Facebook’s known offences had become so long and so grim, causing disruptions to the company’s financial indicators, that amends were vital. Mark Zuckerberg chose to play a risky card, one he had recently been toying with. In his keynote address on the first day of the F8 conference, he promised to completely rewire Facebook around the very thing it was accused of lacking: privacy. A new commitment (a private future for its users) and a poetical claim (“privacy gives us the freedom to be ourselves”) pointed to Facebook’s rewritten mantra.
No matter if we choose to believe or disbelieve Zuckerberg’s announcement regarding the intention to redefine his company around the value of privacy, we cannot ignore the historical significance of the moment. Facebook’s leader was publicly cornered into an unprecedented move; his was the only possible response to appease (even if temporarily) the snowball effect of recent revelations. In many ways, affirming the new objective of Facebook legitimized a cultural tension that had been building up around the idea of privacy in the age of hyperconnectivity, to the point of transforming privacy into a societal turning point. Two explanations seem necessary here. On the one hand, it should be clarified that we are referring to informational privacy – the “freedom from informational interference or intrusion, achieved thanks to a restriction on facts … that are unknown or unknowable” about someone (Floridi 2014a, p. 103). On the other hand, we should not forget that privacy is a social construct, like freedom, justice, or power. As such, it can be understood differently by different people, in different circumstances. In a post-Internet society, it is logical to assume that ideas and expectations of informational privacy have changed from those we held before our collective datafication. Digital technologies of connectivity can be deployed to both decrease and increase informational friction, making personal information more available or less so (depending on knowledge and intent), and therefore both eroding and enhancing informational privacy (2014a). The cultural tension mentioned earlier is the result of our failure to project the consequences of this dual role. Our frontstage experience with being empowered to exert certain levels of control over our personal information online has prevented us from observing the systematic informational intrusion that unfolded backstage.
Since the emergence of social media, users have chosen to share information about themselves in an environment that they knew little about. It was not unreasonable to assume their personal data belonged to them, or at least that it was treated with care since, through their structural organization, platforms gave the impression of a controlled type of sharing. Users did not spend too much of their time questioning this assumption. The reality we have been confronted with in recent years is that we could not have been more wrong. Once released online, our personal information is no longer ours. What is more, our data does not consist solely
