Convergent Media and Privacy

Tim Dwyer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349557196, 9781137306869
• eBook ISBN: 9781137306876
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A lot of personal data is being collected and stored as we use our media devices for business and pleasure in mobile and online spaces. This book helps us contemplate what a post-Facebook or post-Google world might look like, and how the tensions within capitalist information societies between corporations, government and citizens might play out.

1

Introduction

Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual ... the right ‘to be let alone’ ... Numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops’.¹

A key focus of this book is to examine the way that our ideas about privacy change constantly in response to their technological, and therefore their socio-cultural contexts. In this sense, the valorisation of ‘privacy’ is an historical construct shaped through the evolution of particular media and other technologies, usage forms, media practices and discourses. We are all familiar with the extraordinary way that media technologies (and scientific developments more generally) become so quickly naturalised in society. As with traditional media, the new media industries are themselves embedded in political economic contexts, and these tend to mandate their platform arrangements, underlying business patterns and unfolding trends.

The broader canvas of this exploration of the dynamic relations between the media and privacy is a narrative about modernity itself. My argument is that histories of the media inevitably are linked with social and cultural change, and the way in which media have both shaped and are shaped by people’s everyday lives.

From the public’s perspective, the cascading events, print media disclosures and televisual circus that followed from The Guardian’s original revelation in July 2011 that News Corporation’s News of the World had hacked the mobile phone of murdered teen Milly Dowler became synonymous with ‘the media and privacy’. From this point on there was no turning back for the media or journalism. The Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press would then systematically excavate, on an unprecedented scale, the evidence that revealed the grossly unethical dimensions of this species of newspaper journalism’s modus operandi.² Yet the intrusion into people’s private lives afforded by mobile phone technologies was, at the same time, simply the latest episode in the longer history of print mediated ‘news’ journalism that began on an industrial scale in the 18th century.

Layered over the top of these events, convergent media are dynamically interacting with this complex environment, and the mobile Internet is to the fore of this ongoing change. There are seemingly endless varieties of software applications for business and pleasure. Indeed, mediatisation itself varies along with the purpose of the application, their networks and definitions of ‘sociality’. These differences include whether media applications include locative affordances; the categories of data new media platforms generate; and, increasingly, the way in which mobile and wearable media, including embedded sensors in the ‘Internet of Things’, are figured in new media practices.

Critical understanding of contemporary networked privacy needs rethinking as we shift to leading more of our lives in emerging mediatised mobile and online spaces. Convergent Media and Privacy therefore seeks to contextualise privacy historically, socially, culturally and technologically. The book seeks to tease out the nuance of these meanings of privacy contexts of evolving new media industries, technologies, forms, applications and practices. The approach is a multidisciplinary one, being located at the intersection of media and cultural studies, political economy, legal studies, information industries, communication and network studies.

Populations and individuals are being tracked, monitored and surveilled by corporations and governments in ways that were unimaginable only a few decades earlier. The privacy implications of the ubiquitous Internet are quite literally changing how we live.

Algorithmically mediatised living

In this second decade of the 21st century, the sweeping power of national governments to legislate, and to take unilateral privacy invasive measures on a grand scale in the guise of homeland security, has emerged as emblematic of a ‘big data’ surveillance and privacy zeitgeist. These security policies and surveillance practices are now dialectically embedded in our complex digital media landscapes. Certainly, our evolving media privacy is inevitably shaped by the contested platform politics of vested political, economic-technological, and socio-cultural interests, and the shift to what has been called ‘algorithmic living’.³

The privileging of predictive data ways of thinking and knowing is central to this shift. As Mark Andrejevic argues, ‘The promise of automated data processing is to unearth the patterns that are far too complex for any human analyst to detect and to run the simulations that would generate the emergent patterns that would otherwise defy our predictive power’.⁴ Digital media convergence has become the fertile breeding ground for the predictive mode of thinking and knowing. Computer analytics, scaled-up data mining and visualisations can all operate in the service of this mode of thinking. Yet it’s interesting to note that there’s a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this shift: simultaneously a promise of democratic digital media empowerment for individuals goes hand in glove with the reality of elitist access, and the finely-tuned skill set to make use of and interpret database-derived information. Using the alternative qualitative research term of ‘thick data’ rather than ‘big data’, Langlois and Elmer argue that studying communications acts on social media platforms to expose corporate power, requires an ontological unveiling of technical, corporate and media logics.⁵ Their approach to analysing ‘thick’ digital objects (acting interdependently at the ‘media’, ‘network’ and ‘phatic’ layers) has much to offer those concerned with the uses of personal data on social media platforms such as Facebook. They argue:

The articulation of participatory and corporate logics can be examined through identifying the different kinds of informational logics and layers, phatic moments, media processes and their interactions. The analysis of a digital object, even if it takes place within a small sample, can thus yield greater knowledge and awareness as to how corporate social media logics enter into participatory processes.⁶

Some uses of large-scale personal datasets are much less ambiguous. Following the unprecedented surveillance vortex created by the Snowden-National Security Agency (NSA) revelations in 2013, a federal judge from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York scrutinised the legality of the NSA metadata surveillance activities. In his deliberations Judge William Palley III sided with the Obama administration in dismissing a challenge to the legality of the NSA’s bulk metadata program brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. In his ruling Judge Palley, while acknowledging that ‘robust discussions’ were underway across the nation, including in the Congress and White House, nonetheless found that the government’s bulk telephony metadata program was lawful. The judgement makes the point that the Obama Administration began its bulk metadata collection program in the post-9/11 context so it could ‘find and isolate gossamer contacts among suspected terrorists in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data. This blunt tool works because it collects everything. Such a program, if unchecked, imperils the civil liberties of every citizen’.⁷ The judge further observed that if the metadata was ‘plumbed’, the data was capable of revealing a rich profile of any individual and a detailed record of their associations. I will discuss these questions further in Chapter 5 when we consider the way in which state secrecy is traded off against personal privacy. The idea of being able to ‘identify’ individuals in the crowd (‘a needle in a haystack’) remains at the core of what it means to breach hard won rights to privacy, and as a corollary, what might be at stake in the steps taken to preserve personal privacy.

In this book I argue that with the rise of web-based media, social networking and the rapid take-up of mobile devices and apps, notions of privacy are being modified at a commensurate rate for media audiences. It’s important to realise at the outset that powerful market dominating new media corporations such as Google (the owner of YouTube), Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have made it clear that it is their avowed intention to reconfigure people’s understanding of the meanings of personal privacy. This usually incremental change process can be witnessed in continuous website terms of service and software updates by these corporations, developments to handset design and operations, and in the changing ways that people privately use media devices on the move in public spaces.⁸

Lori Andrews argues that ‘Facebook is unilaterally redefining the social contract – making the private now public and making the public now private’.⁹ She observes that public institutions, for example, such as the police, now routinely use data gleaned from social networks to assist them in their investigations, in ways that would have previously often required a court order to obtain the information.

For Jose van Dijck this can be expressed as ‘the Devil is in the Default’. She argues ‘Platform owners have a vested interest in complete openness on the side of users; the more they know about users the more information they can share with third parties’.¹⁰ Similarly, new mobile media when viewed as assemblages of hardware, software and usage practices are actively implicated in a process of redefining the social and cultural meanings of the concepts we generically label as concerning ‘privacy’. In this sense, then, there is a power imbalance regarding our personal information on the owner-design side of these interactive platforms. The extension of digital media affordances to gather, stockpile, and to track and monitor people’s usage data in online mobile spaces is pushing out our understandings of privacy in uncharted directions.

New frontiers in privacy

One of the emerging frontiers of new digital media technologies arises from the convergence of mobile media and locative media. Many of the privacy concerns that relate to locative media overlap with those of online mobile media by dint of their common transmission infrastructures and access devices. The growth of Location-Based Services (LBS) has been linked with the rise in smartphone ownership and people getting location-based directions and information for purchasing goods or services, or using them to ‘check-in’ on social media applications while they’re on the move.¹¹ Smartphone ownership is now part of mainstream media. Market research company eMarketer predicted that by the end of 2014 there would be 4.55 billion users of a mobile phone. Globally the smartphone audience had reached around 1.75 billion and more than 2.23 billion people worldwide, or 48.9% of mobile phone users, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Privacy and Mediatisation
• 3  The Privacy Consequences of Search
• 4  SNS, LBS, Apps and Adverts
• 5  Data Governance
• 6  Digital Media Citizenship
• 7  Conclusion
• Index