Reposted and revised from a Twitter ramble
The reason that ‘digital privacy’ is such a complex and knotty challenge is existential - privacy exists to protect individuality within societal context; whereas digital automation both relies upon and imposes homogeneity.
The more of one = the less of the other.
Humans can sometimes learn to make individual allowances and exceptions to our knee-jerk instincts and learned prejudices; and by doing so, celebrate individuality and recognise the inherent value of conscious personhood.
Software can only perform calculations as directed.
‘Privacy’ means treating people like people, respecting their boundaries, refraining from being exploitative towards them, acknowledging and taking into account their individual agency.
Automation is normalisation, standardisation, funnelling and replication - for efficiency
It’s impossible to optimise both at the same time.
Treating ‘privacy in digital’ solely as a matter of information control, is a dangerous and dehumanising copout. It’s got to start much earlier / higher than that, with examination of intent, power dynamics and values.
But that’s hard to automate so it doesn’t happen much 🤷🏽♀️
Privacy is for treating people like individual PEOPLE
Datafication reduces people to things/stuff
Automation is about putting things/stuff into standard containers so they can be manipulated with ease and efficiency
Incompatibilities abound.
How much privacy is enough? How much datafication is too much? When do the benefits of automation outweigh the drawbacks?
It depends. There’s no 1-size answer. And since we’re now deploying automation to avoid thinking as well as doing; these questions aren’t being asked at all (…except by anxious academics and activists in this particular niche/bubble).
Corporates generally avoid those questions though, because they know the answers they’d give would shame them - in others’ eyes, if not their own. And that’s ‘just business’.