This is a full draft of the paper on Twitter and privacy that I’ve been developing over the past few weeks, entitled ‘Who Gives a ‘Tweet’ About Privacy?’ It uses academic privacy literature to examine Twitter and the notion of reasonable expectations of privacy in public. It is written to help nuance privacy discussions about whether the discourse occuring on Twitter should be read as ‘public’ or ‘private’ communication (and, implicitly, similar social networking and blogging sites). The paper focuses on concepts of privacy and, as such, avoids deep empirical analyses of how the term ‘privacy’ is used by particular members of the social networking environment. Further, the paper avoids delving into the web of legal cases that could be drawn on to inform this discussion. Instead, it is theoretically oriented around the following questions:
- Do Twitter’s users have reasonable expectations to privacy when tweeting, even though these tweets are the rough equivalent of making statements in public?
- If Twitter’s user base should hold expectations to privacy, what might condition these expectations?
The paper ultimately suggests that Daniel Solove’s taxonomy of privacy, most recently articulated in Understanding Privacy, offers the best framework to respond to these question. Users of Twitter do have reasonable expectations to privacy, but as discussed by Solove such expectations are conditioned by juridical understandings of what is and is not reasonable. In light of this, I conclude by noting that his use of law to recognize norms is contestable. Thus, while privacy theorists may adopt his method (a focus on privacy problems to categorize types of privacy infractions), they might profitably condition how and why privacy norms are established – court rulings and dissenting opinions may not be the best foundation upon which to rest our privacy claims – by turning to non-legal understandings of norm development, degeneration, and mutation.
OK. So here’s a question for the rest of you. Chris has posted this very interesting paper for this course on the website for the world to see. Has he thus created an expectation for the rest of you?
Now I have responded to Chris privately with my comments. Does Chris have a reaosnable expectation of privacy that I will not post those comments on this blog, even though he has posted his paper on this blog? Do his expectations matter? I, as an employee of UVIC, am governed by the law with respect to the personal information of my students — and that includes comments on papers, and certainly grades. But would I be justified in posting my comments online, seeing that he has posted his paper online? Has he now surrendered his right to privacy with respect to this paper, and effectively given up any rights he has under the laws of BC? And if so, what expectations would that raise for the rest of you?
These questions are all central to the arguments made in Chris’s paper about the reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to Twitter.
It is challenging to offer a response to this in a text format (so many questions/rich answers are demanded!), so I’ll just try to briefly sketch a few points that can either be picked up in conversation later, or developed in more detail here as a conversation develops.
(1) Has he thus created an expectation for the rest of you?
At the level of this particular posting, my first thought is that publicly posting our papers was a precondition of writing the paper itself. We are expected to post our work here, and this was agreed to several weeks ago. Thus, there was already an expectation that papers would be posted for the world to see.
Stepping away from the particularities of this assignment, I would say that there isn’t a necessary expectation, but instead a suggested expectation, that others would similarly ‘reveal’ themselves publicly. At the same time, however, given the relative lack of publicity by some members of the reading group it would seem that there is a competing set of privacy norms (or, perhaps more likely, temporal resources) at play.
(2) Does Chris have a reaosnable expectation of privacy that I will not post those comments on this blog, even though he has posted his paper on this blog?
No, I don’t. While I might have an expectation that a formal grade wouldn’t appear here, I posted this with the full expectation that comments would be elicited. Now, this is again in part because an aim of the site is to encourage public discussions about papers that are posted. I have committed myself to this, and so my expectation is that others will post their full thoughts on what is written, regardless of how pleasant or unpleasant the comments/criticism might be (assuming that both remain respectful and constructive, and avoid ad hominem attacks, etc). Similarly, this would leave me with the option of challenging such critiques in this space.
(3) Do his expectations matter?
As I’ve written this paper, they do. I argue that privacy norms should be examined contextually, and in the context of this environment it is an accepted norm that public critique will be elicited about what is posted. Now, at the same time there is a question (as you note in your following sentence) about the grounds of such norms. This is a space where I need to do further work; while Solove and Nissembaum suggest that the courts/conservative attitudes should form the buttress of privacy norms, I’m not totally comfortable with either of those resting points. Where and how norms are then formed is something that I need to do more reading and thinking on – how do we interplay rich notions of juridical norms in legal philosophy, social critique, feminist scholarship, etc?
(5)-(6) Has he now surrendered his right to privacy with respect to this paper, and effectively given up any rights he has under the laws of BC? And if so, what expectations would that raise for the rest of you?
I think that this notion of ‘right to privacy’ is what I was trying to think through. If we approach the term from a problem-based position of contextual integrity, I think that such a ‘right’ can be maintained even when posting in a public space, though different normative attitudes for spaces carry with them different conditions for what is realized as ‘private’ and ‘not-private’. The site’s licensing itself suggests that I continue to assert particular rights surrounding the creative uses of my paper – a legal structure has not been abandoned.
At the same time, as stated earlier, I don’t think that I have a reasonable expectation that comments won’t be posted about my paper on the basis of the foundational discussions that were had about how this particular space was to be used. More abstractly, however, when we think of a space where such norms have not already been established, we would need to think through the contextualized norms associated with speaking in that online space.
As for the expectations of others, I think that this has already been implicitly addressed in comments (1) and (2).