[p2p-research] Musing about “sharing” and privacy

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Musing about “sharing” and
privacy via confused of calcutta on 2/28/10

Over the last few years, with the continuing evolution of social media,
there’s been a proliferation of tools that help people share
information, experiences, opinions, even actions and status. Devices
have gotten “smarter” and more ubiquitous, and as a result, sharing has
been made possible in more forms than before: audio, image, video and
text. And, as the communications infrastructure has improved, it has
meant that the things that get shared get shared more quickly.



During all this time, much has been written about privacy and
confidentiality, and about the risks and dangers of sharing. I remember
when the “semantic web” was beginning to get traction four years ago,
there was an ACLU video that explained the “dangers” of “ordering pizza
in the future”. When I had my heart attack and blogged about it, I was
told how career-limiting that would be, how I would become unemployable
as a result. More recently, we’ve had sites like PleaseRobMe, informing
the world at large about empty homes using public signals and status
information, in the hope that people will learn to be more careful
about sharing such information.



It’s not just about the information people share as individuals, we’ve
also had concerns about stuff we make available communally. Take this
site for example: sailwx.info



A site that published the location and movement of ships. Fascinating,
even mesmerising for some. And a godsend to Somalian pirates.

It doesn’t matter who’s telling the story, the moral has been the same.
Sharing creates risk. I want to talk about sharing.

1. Sharing is an inherently vulnerable act


It’s like this blog. Here I share what I think. By sharing what I
think, I make myself vulnerable to you, the reader. And you can choose
to comment constructively or destructively, to provide feedback, to
withhold criticism or even praise. From my perspective, a blog with
comments permanently closed is not a blog. You might as well have a
marriage with a prenuptial agreement. Because what you’re doing is
taking something that is about being vulnerable and trying to remove
the vulnerability from it. Take legal separation. One of the ways that
people define legal separation is by using the phrase a mensa et thoro,
“from bed and board”. Sharing bed and board is a vulnerable thing to
do. You’re at your most defenceless in those contexts.


2. Sharing is a state of mind, a mindset, a culture

I grew up in a Hindu Undivided Family in Calcutta, the eldest of five
siblings. [So I'm a product of a patriarchal, male chauvinist society,
on paper anyway....You wouldn't dare use those words in front of my
paternal grandmother, who passed away recently, in 2006. Patriarchal
society indeed!] The extended family lived under one roof, and we
shared everything. Our time, our interests, even our friends. As a
teenager I would often come home to find that “friends of mine” had
been there all afternoon, even though I’d been elsewhere. Because the
friends were friends of the family, a shared resource. In such
environments, sharing is in our blood. In the past year, I’ve seen
every sibling, maybe half a dozen cousins, and every time I see them it
feels like Yesterday Once More. This Christmas, a bunch of us are
hoping to meet up in Calcutta, remember times past and have a
rollicking time. You know something? We had rollicking times. Every
day. Yes there were fights, yes everything wasn’t always sweetness and
light, but in the main we’ve stayed very close. Because we were born
that way, raised that way.

3. Sharing is about being in a covenant relationship

I’ve been brought up to believe that there are two types of
relationship, covenant and contract. In a contract relationship, it’s
all about privacy. The contract sets out separate recourse in the event
of breach. The two parties in a contract are inherently separate. As
against this, in a covenant relationship, it’s all about sharing. The
covenant sets out what the people in the covenant do together when
things go wrong. As I’ve said before, in a contract you answer the
question “Who pays?”; in a covenant you answer the question “How do we
fix this?”. Whenever I think about sharing, whenever I think about
being in a covenant relationship, I am reminded of the words spoken by
Ruth to Naomi in the Old Testament:

Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I
will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people
and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be
buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything
but death separates you and me.

Now that’s what I call a covenant.

4. Sharing has its conventions and norms

It isn’t just privacy that comes with conventions and norms; sharing
does that as well. Let’s take an example. In the West, in social
circles, particularly amongst youth, I’ve seen bottles shared, passed
on from hand to hand. And from mouth to mouth. This just wouldn’t
happen in India, where there’s this concept of “thu”, when something
has been touched by someone’s saliva. So when you passed a bottle from
hand to hand in India, you would drink from the bottle without the
bottle touching your lips or mouth. And this had to be done visibly and
demonstrably. [This practice served me very well when I first had to
drink a yard of ale].

Image taken from Wikimedia Commons and used on a CC-BY-SA-2.5 licence,
attributed, with thanks, to Lee Tucker



5. Sharing needs to be done by design

The cultural conventions about sharing and not-sharing become even more
interesting when it comes to food. In India it was common practice for
me to be walking home from school or university and inviting five or
ten friends to come home with me, joining the family for a meal. That’s
part of what 6/2 Moira Street was about. On any given day, there were a
dozen “guests” in evidence at home, sometimes more. Friends of the
family, the extended family, neighbours. Some days it was the
Rangaswamis’ turn, some days the Kapoors’, some days the Sillimans’.
Different groups congregated on different floors and then meandered
about from floor to floor, from flat to flat, interchanging seamlessly.
And somehow the families coped, food never ran out. Cups of tea and
coffee aplenty, snacks appearing as if by magic. A culture of
hospitality. [Note: in order to protect the innocent all the names have
been retained. You have been warned.]

And then I came to England. People were hospitable here as well, don’t
get me wrong. I was received warmly, very warmly. But there was a
difference, best described by example. Sometime before we got married
(over 25 years ago) one day we were having guests for dinner. On the
way home from work, I got talking to a friend and invited him to join
us. This was before the days of mobile phones. So I turned up at home
with an extra guest. Which was fine, except that dinner that night was
steak. And the number of steaks equalled the number of original guests,
with no spares. Which meant I had to “make up” a portion for myself by
shaving bits off everyone else’s steak.

You see, I never had to face this in India. Because the dishes were
naturally designed to be shared, to be extensible. You added a little
more rice. Diluted the daal. Chopped a few more vegetables. Made a few
more chapatis.



6. There is such a thing as oversharing

It’s been an interesting time these past years, playing around with
social media. Tools for sharing have grown more sophisticated and more
comprehensive as the concepts of lifestreaming, and of what Clay
Spinuzzi called ambient signalling, have evolved. It’s worth taking a
look at what Nick Felton and gang have been doing, and at the services
that have been spawned as a result, like Daytum.



Particularly when it comes to lifestreaming, there is such a thing as
too much information; if you have the right feedback loops, you will
find out soon enough. Because your signal will turn into noise, and the
people you’re in touch with will tell you to turn the noise down. So
you need to be careful when you share what you’re doing, that you don’t
overload the sharing mechanism. It’s worth reading Danah Boyd’s
writings on this subject: here’s an example.



7. Sharing involves sacrifice

I love the Wikipedia definition of sharing: Sharing is the joint use of
a resource or space. In its narrow sense, it refers to joint or
alternating use of an inherently finite good, such as a common pasture
or a shared residence. Inherently finite. What a nice turn of phrase. I
guess one of the most “inherently finite” things we come across is
time. Our own time on earth. So we make choices with our time, there is
an opportunity cost in its usage. [Incidentally, that is why, given its
inherent "nonrival good" nature, it makes no sense to hoard information
and ideas. But that's a whole 'nother ball game.]



8. There is accountability in sharing

I’ve always been struck by something Clay Shirky said about wikis, more
particularly about why Wikipedia was successful: I paraphrase it as “if
you can keep the cost of repair at least as low as the cost of damage,
then good things happen.” Look at what happens with chewing gum and
with graffiti, two things where the cost of damage is lower than the
cost of repair. You see? Not everyone wants to share, there are selfish
people about, and Hardin’s Tragedy of The Commons is a real thing. But
people can be accountable in shared space, and this is something we
need to learn more about and to encourage.

Which brings me to the whole point of this post.

Stewardship.

Otherwise known as accountability in a shared space.

Complex global issues: the eradication of poverty, stopping
malnutrition and disease, stabilising climate change, preserving our
environment: these are not going to be solved by individuals acting
alone with walls of intense privacy around them. They can only be
solved by people working together in covenant relationships. They can
only be solved by people making themselves vulnerable, people sharing,
people acting responsibly and accountably.

Lifestreaming is also about democratised collection of data, the
aggregation of minutiae about movement, weather, climate, food,
whatever. In the same way as 17th century ships’ captains’ logs have
given us insights into climate change, there is a lot we can learn
about what’s happening around us by sifting through the apparently
boring detail of our lives. In his TED talk, David Cameron spoke about
Transparency, Accountability and Choice, and mentioned his intention to
publish personal, average and “best of breed” details of carbon
footprint, by household, as a means of effecting behavioural change.

Stewardship. It’s a collective thing. More about sharing than about
privacy. We spend a lot of time worrying about privacy.

Time we spent the same amount of time worrying about sharing.

Stewardship.





































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