The Identity Trade

Selling Privacy and Reputation Online

Nora A. Draper

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781479895656
• eBook ISBN: 9781479802845
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cyber Security
• Index: Social Sciences

The successes and failures of an industry that claims to protect and promote our online identities

What does privacy mean in the digital era? As technology increasingly blurs the boundary between public and private, questions about who controls our data become harder and harder to answer. Our every web view, click, and online purchase can be sold to anyone to store and use as they wish. At the same time, our online reputation has become an important part of our identity—a form of cultural currency.

The Identity Trade examines the relationship between online visibility and privacy, and the politics of identity and self-presentation in the digital age. In doing so, Nora Draper looks at the revealing two-decade history of efforts by the consumer privacy industry to give individuals control over their digital image through the sale of privacy protection and reputation management as a service.

Through in-depth interviews with industry experts, as well as analysis of media coverage, promotional materials, and government policies, Draper examines how companies have turned the protection and promotion of digital information into a business. Along the way, she also provides insight into how these companies have responded to and shaped the ways we think about image and reputation in the digital age.

Tracking the successes and failures of companies claiming to control our digital ephemera, Draper takes us inside an industry that has commodified strategies of information control. This book is a discerning overview of the debate around who controls our data, who buys and sells it, and the consequences of treating privacy as a consumer good.

Part I

Selling Privacy to the Masses

1

The Consumer Privacy Space

Building an Industry

In the summer of 1997, on newsstands across the United States, Time magazine pronounced “The Death of Privacy.” Published between an issue promoting a Time exclusive on a deal between “cyberlegends” Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to save Silicon Valley and an issue featuring a retrospective on Princess Diana following her death earlier that year, the August 25 edition contained an eight-page spread detailing the threats posed to privacy, reputation, and identity by digital media. In these pages, Joshua Quittner warned about the role of new technologies in chipping away at existing privacy protections.1 Recently the target of a six-month campaign to hack his online accounts, Quittner warned that “our privacy—mine and yours—has already disappeared, not in one Big Brotherly blitzkrieg but in Little Brotherly moments, bit by bit.”2

This casual erosion of privacy, the article continued, was alarming precisely because its seeming innocuousness had helped to foster a cultural ambivalence about the consequences of technologies that demanded access to personal information. By way of illustration, Quittner pointed to the myriad ways people were routinely and voluntarily, but not always knowingly, providing detailed records to third parties about their location, interests, and habits. Automated bank machines, cell phones, credit cards, and supermarket scanners all generate traces of information that could offer unique insights into individuals’ attitudes, preferences, and behaviors. Perhaps of most concern to Quittner were emerging strategies to track, quantify, and analyze web-browsing patterns to better understand consumer behavior. Marketers, for example, had begun using small files called “cookies” stored in computer browsers to track individuals’ online activities. The result of these efforts to collect and examine newly available information, Quittner wrote, was that data once hidden, obscured by the fact that they were tricky to find and difficult to interpret, were being made accessible and meaningful.3

The article offered strategies for avoiding these increasingly pervasive forms of digital surveillance. Consumers, for example, could give up online shopping and forgo the use of credit cards, choosing instead to shop in person and pay in cash. Drivers could get rid of their E‑ZPasses and other electronic toll collection systems and opt instead to use cash at tollbooths. Internet users could continuously clear cookies from their browser or surf the web from behind a “privacy curtain” so marketers could not keep track of their online behaviors or website preferences. These strategies, however, highlighted the onerous task facing those who wished to avoid digital surveillance. Moreover, Quittner anticipated that most people did not think about privacy in these terms. He presented efforts to opt out not only as ineffective strategies for becoming invisible to surveillance apparatus, but as encouraging social alienation. “Only the Unabomber,” Quittner wrote, “would seriously suggest that we cut all ties to the wired world.”4 Few people, he argued, would waive the unique opportunities created by digital technologies in favor of total obscurity.

This balance between the risks and opportunities of online engagement has become a hallmark of stories about life in the digital age. It reflects the tension revealed by the juxtaposition between the word of the year selections—selfie and privacy—that began this book. Digital infrastructures that support online shopping and social networking offer immense efficiencies while simultaneously supporting an environment characterized by information asymmetry in which data collection and use by public and private organizations is ubiquitous and, often, invisible. Building online profiles through which to connect with others opens unique possibilities for social engagement at the same time as it can introduce reputational risks if, for example, information is accessed by unexpected audiences or circulated out of context.5 Quittner’s strategies for avoiding persistent forms of surveillance highlight that doing so often means giving up significant social and economic benefits. Privacy solutions that demand individuals choose whether to opt in or out of digital life are unsatisfying due to their treatment of engagement in all-or-nothing terms.6 Few people live at these extremes; rather than seeking to be virtual hermits or online exhibitionists, most people pursue options that allow them to toggle between controlled visibility and intentional obscurity. One of the core principles uniting companies in the consumer privacy industry is a belief that all-or-nothing approaches to visibility fail to capture personal preferences or the realities of life online. The companies introduced in the following chapters have built tools and services that attempt to allow people to navigate the surveillance ecosystem even as they enjoy the conveniences and pleasures of digital tools.

Broadcast Online: The Risks of Being Seen

I first read about Nick Bergus’s experience as an accidental spokesperson for personal lubricant when I was researching online reputation and consumer culture as a graduate student. I was drawn to the story because it illustrated a fundamental anxiety about communicating and sharing information online. “In the context of a sponsored story,” Bergus wrote in the final paragraph of his blog post, “some of the context in which it was a joke is lost, and I’ve started to wonder how many people now see me as the pitchman for a 55-gallon drum of lube.”7 When it was repurposed as an advertisement, Bergus’s post went from a single entry on his social media timeline to a piece of promotional content that was popping up repeatedly in his friends’ social media feeds. In this transition the post was stripped of the context that would encourage Bergus’s friends to read his comments as satire rather than as an endorsement. Part of the anxiety surrounding online privacy comes from an appreciation of just how easily this decontextualization can occur—the ease with which digital pictures and messages shared in public and semipublic forums can be taken out of context, circulated, and used in unexpected and unintended ways. The persistence of the resulting profiles—both those that are visible and those created through the aggregation and analysis of data—introduces a sense of permanence that can make digital reputations feel inevitable and inescapable. Anxieties about the death of privacy tap into a sense of powerlessness that stems from a feeling we have little control over how others see us.

By altering the spaces and conditions in which people encounter one another, new media technologies provide a platform on which and through which individuals negotiate the changing conditions and contexts of self-presentation and identity construction. Perhaps the most famous response to a new media technology’s challenge to expectations of privacy comes from lawyers Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis. In an 1890 Harvard Law Review article titled “The Right to Privacy,” the authors argued that a growing public appetite for salacious news stories in the late nineteenth century was being fed by journalists who, capitalizing on innovations in photography, were capturing and publishing private images of public figures.8 Warren and Brandeis worried that, in the hands of journalists, the camera would circumvent physical boundaries that had established the privacy of particular spaces and activities. The pair’s definition of privacy as the “right to be let alone”9 has become the foundation for modern notions of privacy in the United States.10

While these authors were concerned about access to portable cameras to produce forms of visibility that contributed to unwanted exposure, similar concerns regarding the erosion of privacy have accompanied the introduction of other media technologies. Responses to the introduction of telephones into private homes generated unease about the division between domestic and social realms and produced fears that family secrets would become public spectacles.11 Even the implementation of the U.S. Postal Service generated concerns that letters would be intercepted and opened or shared beyond their intended recipients.12 It is through this capacity to challenge the physical and normative boundaries that divide public and private life and regulate behavior that new technologies routinely prompt anxieties about the erosion of privacy.

Long before I learned about sponsored stories or even Facebook, however, another story introduced me to the complicated nature of identity construction in online spaces. As a high school student in Toronto, and later a university student in Ottawa, I followed closely the murder trial of a twelve-year-old Canadian boy, initially known in the media only as “Johnathan.” The details of this case have stuck with me in part because of their tragic nature, but also as an exemplar of the complex realities, and profound consequences, of engagement and self-presentation in virtual spaces. The facts of the murder are gruesome and need not be repeated in detail here.13 Rather, what is pertinent is how the case—which eventually concluded in the conviction of two young men—initially ended in a mistrial. At the center of the Crown’s case in the first trial was the testimony of the girlfriend of one of the co-accused. Alarmed by a phone call she had received from her boyfriend on the day of Johnathan’s death, she called the young man back later in the day and recorded their conversation—one in which he shared his intention to join a plot to murder his friend’s brother and stepfather.

The defense for the young man explained the phone call as an attempt by its client to show off for a girl who was losing interest in their nascent relationship, reportedly describing the conversation as “the musings of one vampire enthusiast to another.”14 When she took the stand, however, the witness undermined the defense’s argument by claiming no interest in vampirism. While the jury was deliberating, a journalist uncovered and published posts from a vampire-related website reportedly made by the witness. In these posts the young woman appeared to contradict claims made in court that she found talk of vampires childish and unexciting. Although the witness’s page on the site had been deleted months before the trial, a “cached” version was located through a search for her screen name.15 According to reports, the defense lawyer introduced the posts as a strategy for discrediting the young woman’s dismissal of arguments that she shared her boyfriend’s interest in vampires: “This seems to be some sort of chatroom . . . she includes among her ‘likes’ blood, pain, cemeteries and darkness . . . there may well have been semi-nude photographs.”16 These details, including the seemingly irrelevant point that the young woman may have shared nude images, were used to weaken the Crown’s efforts to present the witness as a poised and responsible young woman who secured evidence and alerted police to the crime.

Although the trial eventually concluded with a guilty verdict, the details of the mistrial continued to resonate with me. As a high school and university student, I was used to communicating with friends online—using instant messaging, visiting chat rooms, and writing in online journals—with little thought about how the information I shared in these spaces might be understood if encountered by others. Although it was not the same as the anonymous and fractured identity play described by social psychologist Sherry Turkle in her seminal research on early online communities—those in which socio-technical features supported the multiplicity and fluidity of identities that often differed from those assumed offline17—my online interactions did provide opportunities to engage in forms of self-presentation that were less informed by the structural realities of my offline life. My friends and I were, as I now understand it, engaged in what media scholar danah boyd has described as a form of identity exploration and relationship building that takes place across online and offline spaces.18 The Johnathan trial, however, caused me to reflect, for the first time, on my own online identity. How might others read the messages I sent to friends online? Could my own digital image be used to tell a story about me? Would that story be different than the one I told about myself?

Social theorists recognize self-determination as a unique feature of modern life. Sociologist Anthony Giddens, for example, has described the late modern self as a “reflexive project” in which one’s narrative biography is articulated, revised, and signaled to others through the adoption of a cohesive set of practices called lifestyles.19 The relative freedom to select between these lifestyles provides individuals with a range of options through which to consider, construct, and reconstruct their own biographies.20 Although this freedom is a widely celebrated part of modern life, the risks associated with choosing between preferred versions of ourselves have been well attended to by theorists. When modern identities become untethered from community traditions—as occurs, for example, when individuals are freed from the constraints of familial station that are calcified in more traditional societies to craft their identities21—they are also faced with the consequences that accompany those decisions.

Sociologist Ulrich Beck used the term “industrialized individualism” to refer to an environment in which the construction of identity is treated as a personal responsibility.22 Like Giddens, Beck described the dissolution of traditional social and economic structures that constrain self-narration as enabling the construction of “elective” identities or what he called “do-it-yourself” biographies.23 Alongside the freedom offered by self-determination, however, are the responsibilities associated with these choices. The “do-it-yourself biography,” Beck concluded, must simultaneously be understood as a “risk biography.”24 Individuals, moreover, do not experience this risk equally. The narratives of freedom and choice that characterize discourse about self-presentation are bound by social constructs that limit how those freedoms are accessed. To assume that an undesirable public image can be attributed to a lack of personal responsibility or poor choices around self-presentation ignores the ways that social factors that include race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and class shape available opportunities for identity construction.25

In his classic definition of self-presentation, sociologist Erving Goffman drew on theatrical metaphors to describe individuals as actors who exert control over their image.26 For Goffman, social interactions are purposeful, motivated by a strategic goal, and informed by a broader narrative agenda. Through performances in which the conditions and content of interactions are carefully managed to appeal to a specific audience, individuals construct a personal image with the help of those around them. Since, as Goffman observed, not all audiences expect us to behave in the same way, risks are introduced when we are forced to perform for multiple audiences at the same time. Digital platforms that allow individuals to craft a profile and define an intended audience closely mirror the deliberate strategies of self-presentation articulated by Goffman—a perspective that implies social interactions can be successfully managed through a comprehensive awareness of audience and carefully constructed performances. By allowing individuals to draw on text and images to build a preferred version of themselves and negotiate responses to this image, social network platforms present opportunities for the careful crafting of what Goffman called an idealized version of the self.27

At the same time as they provide tools for strategic self-presentation, however, digital platforms complicate the knowledge and control one can exert over their audience, a practice Goffman described as essential for impression management. As illustrated by the persistence of the chatroom messages highlighted in the Johnathan case, the possibility for information to be replicated, stored, and searched means that content can be stripped of its c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction: Framing the Consumer Privacy Industry
• Part I. Selling Privacy to the Masses
• Part II. Privacy Goes Public
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author