Dec 23, 2024 06:51 PM
https://www.thedriftmag.com/on-the-grid/
EXCERPTS: . . . Today, this triumph of privacy advocates reads like a false dawn. In the decades since, we have indeed, as the Georgetown professor warned, completely lost “control of how, and by whom, personal information is used.”
The result is that we are now locked in innumerable contracts through which we surrender our personal information for convenience or pleasure — for better search results, faster delivery, more helpful recommendations, thimblefuls of dopamine. We feel conflicted about these agreements, but also powerless to amend or terminate them...
[...] But there is something more insidious happening, too. Technology companies have so thoroughly conditioned us to believe we are powerless when it comes to digital privacy that our attitudes toward privacy more broadly have also been warped. Just as in the era of the PATRIOT Act the national security state insisted that it was virtuous, even patriotic, to give in to the intelligence machine, tech culture now ascribes its own virtues to the forfeiture of privacy: realness and connection. Where we once guarded our control over personal information, we now give up control not just freely but even tenderly... We’ve begun to celebrate surveillance as a form of intimacy.
[...] What might have seemed, not too long ago, like a dangerous act of exposure has rapidly become a security blanket and a source of recreation. Location-sharing apps allow parents to track their adolescent children, and adult children to keep tabs on their senescent parents. [...] In these duty-bound dynamics, there may be a clear sense in which the person tracking is responsible for the well-being of the person who’s being tracked — one party gives up privacy in exchange for care. (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: . . . Today, this triumph of privacy advocates reads like a false dawn. In the decades since, we have indeed, as the Georgetown professor warned, completely lost “control of how, and by whom, personal information is used.”
The result is that we are now locked in innumerable contracts through which we surrender our personal information for convenience or pleasure — for better search results, faster delivery, more helpful recommendations, thimblefuls of dopamine. We feel conflicted about these agreements, but also powerless to amend or terminate them...
[...] But there is something more insidious happening, too. Technology companies have so thoroughly conditioned us to believe we are powerless when it comes to digital privacy that our attitudes toward privacy more broadly have also been warped. Just as in the era of the PATRIOT Act the national security state insisted that it was virtuous, even patriotic, to give in to the intelligence machine, tech culture now ascribes its own virtues to the forfeiture of privacy: realness and connection. Where we once guarded our control over personal information, we now give up control not just freely but even tenderly... We’ve begun to celebrate surveillance as a form of intimacy.
[...] What might have seemed, not too long ago, like a dangerous act of exposure has rapidly become a security blanket and a source of recreation. Location-sharing apps allow parents to track their adolescent children, and adult children to keep tabs on their senescent parents. [...] In these duty-bound dynamics, there may be a clear sense in which the person tracking is responsible for the well-being of the person who’s being tracked — one party gives up privacy in exchange for care. (MORE - details)