Christian Heller: Post-Privacy

The dissolution of privacy in the digital age shatters personal and social securities. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Privacy as we understand it is a recent historical development. Its role in personal freedom and social progress has been praised as well as questioned. Privacy enables and disables. It can protect us from undue social pressure; it can serve as a space of higher personal freedom than we would find in the public. It can also isolate and imprison us. Privacy can be akin to forcing into shame and secrecy that which society does not approve of or does not want to be known.

As we externalize our social and personal lives into Google, Facebook and Twitter, privacy seems to fade away. There are warnings that this will lead us into victimization by surveillance states, corporations, employers and our intolerant neighborhood. But these very same institutions can just as well be put under pressure by a shattering of privacy. Instead of seeing the current privacy earthquake just as a danger to be prohibited, we should open our eyes to its emancipatory potentials: towards creating a "Transparent Society" (David Brin), towards making our world more tolerant by exposing it to that which previously was forced into secrecy (as the Gay Pride movement did through public outing) and towards questioning our values of shame, biographical guilt and public adequacy that privacy was constructed to protect us from.