The Context of the Internet

In this lesson, we’ll consider the mistaken belief that a person’s actions and expressions online are somehow disconnected from their real life. This mistake follows from a fundamental misunderstanding about the privacy context in which the Internet exists.

Scope of the Problem

When I was an undergraduate at Clemson, there was a local Internet forum run by fellow students. These students were involved in the same clubs, went to the same classes, and even shared their user names on this forum in person. Inexplicably to my undergraduate self, these students would share all kinds of sordid details about their private lives, sexual conquests, beliefs, and experiences on the forum. However, they would not talk about the same things in person, and it was a faux pas to discuss the forum “IRL” (In Real Life). Yet nobody was actually anonymous on the forum. While one could argue (correctly) that a bunch of male computer science and electrical and computer engineering majors were deficient in social skills, I’ve noticed the same patterns in broader society. Evidently, so have researchers.¹

Even with knowledge that companies are siphoning their personal information and sharing it with governments, people continue to overshare online. Social media, in this case including sites like YouTube, are full of disclosures that a person might not make in front of a live audience or to complete strangers on an airplane. Yet, somehow, people view their online selves as different from their physical selves. When I point out this paradox, a familiar refrain I hear is that, “I have nothing to hide, so why should I care if someone is watching me online?”. Some intelligence and law enforcement services seem to agree with this sentiment, since they label people potential terrorists or criminals – or “privacy extremists” – if they seek to protect their own digital privacy.² I suppose I’m on a list at some three-letter-acronym agency now that I’ve been teaching a course on the subject.

Privacy Contexts

The main problem with the “nothing to hide” mentality is that these same people say they would be upset if I, or another professor, or their parents, could find out the same information about them that they’ve been sharing online. In the previous lesson, we saw that privacy can be broken into different zones: personal, intimate, semi-private, and public.³ However, other research has shown that the way a person identifies these zones is not necessarily consistent or predictable.

In a review of interdisciplinary privacy literature, Stuart et al. (2019) finds that individuals differ in their privacy expectations. The majority of people surveyed tend to take a pragmatic approach to privacy, while about a third are protective of their privacy. Roughly 10% fall into the “open book” category and are not concerned with privacy at all. In addition, people tend to be inconsistent with how much privacy they want, shifting their expectations over time. Privacy is also contextually dependent, at least when it concerns individual as opposed to group privacy.⁴

The concept of privacy context is that information is shared with the understanding that it has some type of limited use, or a “context in which it [is] ‘intended’.”⁴ Thus, privacy can be equated to maintaining contextual integrity, or limiting the use of information to the intent for which a person shared it in the first place.⁵ Stated another way, a breach of privacy can be called a context collapse since the expectations under which the information was originally shared have been violated.⁴

The Internet is a Public Space

Perhaps one of the greatest risks of sharing information online is that the privacy context of the present-day commercial Internet is effectively uncontrolled. Companies engage in mass surveillance, data aggregation, profiling, targeted advertising, and information sharing.⁶ Furthermore, once information becomes available online, it is often re-posted and archived, making it possible for anyone to find. Thus, someone who feels comfortable sharing something on an Internet forum or in social media, with the expectation that the audience for that information will be limited, could later discover that their expected context has collapsed spectacularly – and that collapse could occur days, weeks, months, or even years in the future.

Logically, one might assert that the Internet falls into the public zone in the taxonomy from Koop et al. (2017). However, the situation is actually far worse. As Westin (1967) surmised, a person’s privacy in public assumes that the person can be anonymous – that is, they are not identified or surveilled in the public space.⁷ The modern Internet economy is built upon surveillance capitalism,⁸ which means that Westin’s assumption about a public space doesn’t even apply.

You Are Not Anonymous

If there is one takeaway from applying privacy context to the Internet, it is that anything on the Internet – including all social media platforms – is a forum that is beyond public in nature. Even if a particular interaction seems to have some element of privacy context, there is no guarantee that data shared in that interaction will remain within the constraints of its original intent.

It is also important to remember that a person is not anonymous when using an Internet service, so even the countermeasure of not sharing a real-life identity in an online interaction is not sufficient to mitigate the inevitable context collapse. As we will see in later sections of this OER, companies go to great lengths to identify users – even those who do not log into a site or share real personal identifying information. Furthermore, there are now corporations who specialize in monitoring Internet traffic worldwide, and these companies can use traffic analysis techniques to correlate online activities between sites and services.

Notes and References