Lecture By Antonio Casilli (Sociologist and Professor of Digital Humanities), September 18th 2015, Centennial Memorial Hall of the College of Liberal Arts, Yonsei University

1. Four theses on mass surveillance
and privacy negotiation
Antonio A. Casilli

2.  The Leak Movement
 Civil society denouncing the digital military-industrial complex…

3.  Unexpected outcome: mass electronic surveillance in the open
 Instead of correcting Western securitarian excesses, leaks seem to
instigate them and push governments to step up a gear

4. 1st
thesis : SURVEILLANCE HAS
BECOME PARTICIPATORY

5.  How did we go from centralized, active surveillance paradigm…

6.  …to passive, participatory, spy-on-ye-one-another paradigm?

7.  ...or this?

8.  Disclosure of contents voluntarily put
online by users
 Mutual and horizontal surveillance
 Lack of control over TOS on platforms
where personal data are collected and
stored

9.  The hypothesis of the “End of Privacy”…
 “Publicness” (Jeff Jarvis, 2011)
 Is our identity “public by default”?

10. 2nd
thesis : CLAIMS THAT ‘THE END
OF PRIVACY IS NIGH’ ARE
ERRONEOUS AND IDEOLOGICALLY
BIASED

11.  “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”
Scott McNealy, CEO Sun Microsystems, 1999
 “Public is the new social norm.”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook, 2010
 “Privacy may actually be an anomaly.”
Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist Google, 2013
 “People are used to being under
surveillance.”
Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman Google, 2014

12.  In an attempt at historical and cultural
restoration, tech giants aim to the
ideological return to a “pre-privacy” time
that they portray as one of harmony and
openness among primary circles of
socialization.

13.  Facebook increasingly make your information public by default (blue areas) –
users you opt out

14. Evolution 2005-2011 of level of disclosure for different profile items on
Facebook (network of a major US university): red (public); blue (private).
 Users actually opt out from public by default
F Stutzman, R Gross, A Acquisti (2012) Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook. J of Privacy & Condentiality, 4(2), 7-41.

15. Exogenous interventions by platform owners make users’ private data public by default (a). After an initial
adjustment phase where users lower their average privacy level (b), they opt out and go private again(c).
Subsequent interventions by platform owners prompt cyclical reactions (d).
 Outcome: “cycles of privacy”
(a) (b) (c) (d)
P Tubaro, AA Casilli, Y Sarabi (2014). Against the hypothesis of the end of privacy. An ABM approach to social media. Berlin: Springer.

16.  “Moral entrepreneur” = a social actor
(individual or organization) that seeks to
influence a society to adopt or maintain a
norm.
 Periodical privacy incidents concerning
social media platforms show that users
react vehemently to changes in corporate
privacy policies
 Usual Facebook reaction: backpaddling and
compromising (see table in next slide)

17. Date Privacy incident Users’ reaction Platform reaction
05/09/2006 Introduction of News Feed (content and user updates
aggregator).
Users’ uproar over the default opt-in policy. Creation of the
advocacy group “Students against Facebook News Feed” to
protest the new feature. The group attracts almost 300,000
members.
Apologies by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s
funder and CEO. FB limits name search.
06/11/2007 Introduction of Beacon (advertising system aggregating
purchase data over several platforms, most prominently
Amazon).
Prominent political activist platform MoveOn.org creates an
online petition against Beacon. Their Facebook group reaches
50,000.
Mr Zuckerberg issues official apology. Beacon
ultimately shut down in September 2009.
09/12/2009 Facebook changes its privacy settings, making sharing with
everyone compulsory: legal names, profile pictures, and
gender are now public by default.
An alliance of privacy organisations files a complaint with
America’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
(see next item)
21/04/2010 Facebook introduces the Like button social plugin for
external websites. Users can now log in, like and share
contents (“frictionless sharing”) on other services through
their Facebook account.
Prompted by their constituents, a group of American senators
asks the FTC to establish privacy guidelines for Facebook.
Privacy groups file a formal complaint to the FTC against
Facebook’s “unfair and deceptive trade practice of sharing
user information with the public and with third-party
application developers.
At the end of May 2010, Mr Zuckerberg
announces new and simplified privacy
settings.
14/01/2011 Facebook makes users’ addresses and phone numbers
available to external websites.
After negative feedback from users, Facebook disables the
feature. At the end of the month, the fan page of Mr
Zuckerberg is hacked and compromised.
The following day, Facebook starts
implementing https secure pages.
08/2011 Following a series of complaints filed by Austrian student
association Europe v. Facebook. org, it emerges that
Facebook fails to comply with the rule of allowing its users
to download their own personal data: it provides only 39
over 84 personal data categories.
Negative media attention and creation of several campaigns
requiring Facebook to give users full access to their data.
Platform has to face larges privacy class
action ever (25000 users from Europe, Asia,
Latin America and Australia demanding €500
in compensation each).
05/2012 Facebook proposes a new and more complex privacy policy
while asking for generic “users’ feedback”.
40,000 user comments force vote on proposed alternatives
to privacy policies.
FB forced to implement voting system on
privacy policies.
20/06/2012 Facebook announces acquisition of facial recognition
technology company Face.com (creates database of users’
biometric information through photo-tagging).
Privacy advocacy groups file complaint to the FTC
recommending suspension of facial recognition technology
and protesting creation of biometric profiles of users without
their explicit consent.
Irish Data Protection Authority bans biometric
profiling.
24/09/2012 So called “Facebook bug” publicly displays 2007-2009
private messages.
French Data Authority (CNIL) auditions FB France officials. Official statement and clarifications by FB.
05/06/2013 Edward Snowden’s leaks classified documents claiming NSA
direct access to Facebook servers
Crowdfunded European procedure brings together an
international team of lawyers challenging Safe Harbor
allowing EU-US Facebook data flows. In June 2014, the Irish
High Court refers the matter to the CJEU (European Union
Court of Justice.
By April 2014, FB introduces “privacy
checkup” service to make sure users know
when they are publicly sharing data.
November 2014, FB sets up anonymous
access via encrypted network Tor.
20/09/2013 Zuckerberg launches Internet.org (partnership with
Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Opera Software, Nokia and
Qualcomm, to bring free internet service to developing
countries).
65 advocacy organizations in 31 countries release an open
letter to Facebook protesting the project as violating net
neutrality, freedom of expression, and privacy.
September 2015: Zuckerberg changes name
of Internet.org mobile app to Free Basics,
commits to privacy and security by encrypting
information and supporting HTTPS protocol.

18.  Ideological discourse hides political and
economic tensions
 Full-fledged culture war over confidentiality,
anonymity, and secrecy.

19. 3rd
thesis : RATHER THAN FADING
AWAY, THE ‘CARE OF PRIVACY’
INCREASINGLY PERMEATES
DIGITAL SOCIABILITIES

20.  Today’s “privacy incidents” are not limited
to celebrities and politicians
 The need to control information circulating
on oneself becomes more and more
common
 E. g. the big social experiment known as
the “right to be forgotten” (more than
250,000 removal requests from Google
Search results in one year).

21.  After Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘care of
the self’, the care of privacy can be
described as the task of defining the
boundary between public and private—in
other words, between collective
responsibilities and constraints, and that
which pertains to the individual capacity to
think and act.

22.  From an indistinct sphere where individual
intimacy was dispersed in a network of
collective, feudal and community’ structures
 End of Middle Ages: disruption of
solidarities of feudal system, lineage,
religious community.
 Writing and print: analyzing oneself
through diaries
 Egalitarian relationships, with an
emphasis on friendship between peers
 Reconfiguration of living space: nuclear
families in private accommodations

23.  Origins of the notion de privacy
 Tocqueville (1835) : Public opinion can be
an oppressing power, shaping laws and
mores(not always for the best)
 Danger for individual autonomy
 “Tyranny of the majority”: risk to disregard
individual specificities and to oppress
minorities.

24.  To overcome such risk…
 John Stuart Mill (1859) : “one very simple
principle” (or harm principle)
 “The only part of the conduct of anyone,
for which he is amenable to society, is that
which concerns others. In the part which
merely concerns himself, his independence
is, of right, absolute.”
 The notion of privacy, as a sphere of
“absolute independence”, starts to shape
up

25.  Until then, notions concerns behaviors.
What about information about an
individual?
 Media and technological innovation
defines
 Popular press, gossip press and
photographic journalism: invasion of
celebrities’ private lives.

26.  Louis Brandeis & Samuel Warren (1890): the
right to privacy
 Protect private life of celebrities (and
possibly common citizens) from the
excesses of information.
 For every information which is not of public
interest, a new right is recognized: the right
to be left alone

27. 4th
thesis : PRIVACY HAS CEASED TO
BE AN INDIVIDUAL RIGHT AND HAS
BECOME A COLLECTIVE
NEGOTIATION

28.  Brandeis & Warren embody the traditional
approach to privacy as penetration
 Private life conceived as a core of private,
sensitive information
 The more we move away from the core, the
less sensitive becomes the information, the
more people can share it
 Invasion of privacy = penetration by
external agent (government, media,
criminal…)

29. New digital approach to privacy as
negotiation
What is private is decided within a
certain online context, and in
agreement with a certain social
environment
Every day we adjust sensitive
information according to social
feedback
Users push the boundaries
collectively of what is private and
what others do with shared
information

30. A collective negotiation

31. • Three very good reasons to oppose the
“privatization of privacy”
1.Trading data for money creates
inequalities
2.Platforms are too strong (and opaque)
negotiators
3.My data are personal but are also
collective (they disclose information about
my social contacts)

32. Merci beaucoup !
감사합니다
- E-mail : casilli@telecom-paristech.fr
- Twitter : @AntonioCasilli

33.  Antonio A. Casilli (2011) “Surveillance participative”,
Problèmes politiques et sociaux, 988 (1).
 Antonio A. Casilli (2013) “Contre l'hypothèse de la ‘fin
de la vie privée’. La négociation de la privacy dans les
médias sociaux”, Revue Française des Sciences de
l'Information et de la Communication, 3 (1).
 Paola Tubaro, Antonio A. Casilli, Yasaman Sarabi
(2014), Against the hypothesis of the "end of privacy".
An agent-based modelling approach to social media,
Berlin: Springer.
 Antonio A. Casilli (2015) “Four Theses on Digital Mass
Surveillance and the Negotiation Of Privacy”, 8th
Annual Privacy Law Scholar Congress 2015, Jun 2015,
Berkeley, United States.
 Antonio A. Casilli (2015) “Quelle protection de la vie
privée face aux attaques contre nos libertés
numériques ?”, in La France dans la transformation
numérique : quelle protection des droits fondamentaux
?, Paris: La Documentation Française.