Work and Privacy: Hanging on to the Old or Inventing the New?

Too many people seem to be having a moment of Schadenfreude in the wake of the Ashley Madison hack – what were “those” people thinking of having an affair (estimates for the overall percentage of married adults having affairs range from 30-60%) or at least of being so “dumb” as to use a service to arrange their affair. But this is just the latest instance of information being disclosed that people thought would be private. Just shortly before it was disclosed that 4.5 million medical records at UCLA have been breached. And then there was the Office of Personnel Management’s database with 22 million records not just of security clearances but also of health records.

In each case evidence emerges about bad security practices and there is outrage of the form “how could they not have x” where x is some measure aimed at preventing a data breach. And while I agree that there was low hanging fruit that might have prevented on or the other specific breach, the idea that breaches can and should be avoided altogether is more dangerous than the breaches themselves. First, attempts to really control data inevitably lead down a path toward restrictions on general purpose computing. Second, the focus on technological solutions distracts us from investigating the social and economic changes required for protecting people instead of data.

In a conversation yesterday I came to realize that there is an important parallel between the discussions about work and the ones about privacy. I believe that digital technology is irrevocably reshaping both the labor market and the access to information. In both cases we are faced with two options: hanging on to the old, or inventing the new. We can try to get back to full employment or we can embrace decoupling basic needs from work. We can try to maintain existing notions of privacy or we can embrace transparency and collective learning.

In the same conversation an interesting point came up about dignity. We have constructed a notion of dignity at the moment that has become tied up with having a job and being able to keep secrets about yourself. This is really a profound confusion of the means with the ends. By hanging on to the old in both cases we are furthering that confusion and propping up a system that is already past its expiration date. That will require increasingly desperate measures and in doing so we make the inevitable correction that much worse when it finally arrives.