By Maria Padhila
Who needs the NSA when you’ve got one ticked-off person with a cell phone?
Last week, a woman on a train arguably exposed a lot more personal information to a lot more people than the government has done through the PRISM project when she got tired of listening to a married guy brag with his friends about how he was screwing around on his wife.
She snapped his photo and posted it to Facebook with the note: “If this is your husband, I have endured a 2 hour train ride from Philadelphia listening to this loser and his friends brag about their multiple affairs and how their wives are too stupid to catch on. Oh please repost…”
Most of the people who I saw flashing the repost and commenting were at least full of snickers and at most actively applauding. But I find these kinds of individual exposures of “that cheatin’ pig” type to be at least tiresome and at most destructive. I don’t give a hoot when a politician Tweets his wang to a lady, nor do I when a citizen does so. It’s not my business; I don’t know the whole story.
Yeah, the guy was a jerk, and listening to him in a closed space is why they invented headphones (which, by the way, I don’t and can’t use because of hearing problems). But how would I know that he wasn’t lying, didn’t have an arrangement with his wife, wasn’t actually gay and trying to represent so he could be one of the boys… and, ultimately, it’s not my business.
Several commentators looked at this with more of an eye to its implications. Katy Waldman was one of the most cogent:
… even before PRISM, our social-media-drenched world has forced us to consider anew the value, scope, and purpose of privacy. Is it appropriate for journalists to publish roundups of stupid tweets? For potential employers to scour your Tumblr? Can I noncreepily allude to an Instagram picture an acquaintance uploaded when we run into each other at CVS?
Privacy is about more than the immediate what and where of surveillance. It is also about what happens to the data after it is swept up. Do a few people see it? Does your employer? Does the entire Internet? According to my sliding-scale definition of privacy (copyright 2013!), a guy being a jerk in front of 10 or so strangers in a train compartment justly opens himself up to about 10 strangers’ worth of ridicule. Is it fair to subject him to orders of magnitude more than that?
This “social policing” done on this more intimate scale is just a reflection of the large-scale government spying going on, and both types of spying deserve some closer examination. (If you’re a Planet Waves member, you got to read yesterday Eric’s breakdown of the personal and psychological implications of this mirroring of prying activities, thanks also to some helpful PW researchers.)
Waldman goes on:
We act differently when someone is watching; we act really differently when 183,000 people are watching. What happens when you try to develop an authentic self under the weight of all those eyes, in the grip of all that pressure? … What if, instead of forcing us to, say, not cheat, the heightened visibility created by Facebook and Twitter just pushes our wrongdoing deeper underground? …
We walk a fine line with social policing (as with regular policing) between reducing actual bad behavior and just forcing it into the shadows. No, I don’t know how to negotiate that tightrope. Do you?
Polyamory depends on honesty about what you’re doing with whom. A lot of effort goes into differentiating poly people from the cheating, mistressing, affairing and more that goes on under most circumstances. To be open about having relationships with more than one person is a leap beyond these past methods of dealing with some people’s needs in relationships; it requires honesty with oneself and others. There are all kinds of points along that honesty spectrum. Many have rules about how much they want to know and hear; I would never disclose to one of my loves something personal that the other didn’t say was OK to talk about.
But forced outing, as we’ve seen in the LGBT community, doesn’t work. It doesn’t help gain rights, protection, understanding, compassion or progress. It can even, particularly for trans and genderqueer people, be damn downright dangerous.
I remembered some problems about people becoming inadvertently outed through social media, and found this year-old Wall Street Journal article about some students accidentally outed when their Facebook friends (including parents) were notified that they had joined the Queer Chorus choir on campus. Even if the tech has changed slightly, the issues are still the same:
Losing control online is more than a technology problem — it’s a sociological turning point. For much of human history, personal information spread slowly, person-to-person if at all.
The Facebook era, however, makes it possible to disclose private matters to wide populations, intentionally or not. Personal worlds that previously could be partitioned — work, family, friendships, matters of sexuality — become harder to keep apart. One solution, staying off Facebook, has become harder to do as it reaches a billion people around the world.
Facebook is committed to the principle of one identity for its users. It has shut down accounts of people who use pseudonyms and multiple accounts, including those of dissidents and protesters in China and Egypt. The company says its commitment to “real names” makes the site safer for users. It is also at the core of the service they sell to advertisers, namely, access to the real you.
This stance on the part of Facebook is particularly amusing to me, someone who has two identities and uses a well-established name, but still a pen name, in half of my daily and most of my online life. Perhaps three-quarters of my Facebook friends use pseudonyms and many people I know change their names on a whim.
There’s magic and power in creating an identity and using other names, as artists, rappers, DJs — and women over the past 200 years or so who have wanted to do simple things like own property, publish, perform, or travel freely — will testify. It doesn’t do much for privacy — if someone really wants to get you, they’ll find you. Different names and identities just make it a little more inconvenient.
Every time some kind of privacy issue like this comes out, there are a flurry of posts about how you can “protect yourself” by clicking this, then that, then this other thing, or hovering over this without clicking on that, or god knows what. Do you pay any attention to them? I don’t, and I’d venture to say I have more to “fear.”
Does this mean I don’t care about my privacy? No, but I don’t want to have to make it my full-time job, any more than I want to become a day trader or a car mechanic. There’s the same kind of exhaustion in regard to food, and medicine — we think we ought to be able to rely on a certain standard of life just to get through, day to day, and when we find out our food is full of poison brought to you by Monsanto, it’s discouraging.
I also think it’s interesting that some of the only sponsors left for the right-wing radio nuts (except gold — a hoarder is forever) are various schemes designed to protect you from identity theft online! People befuddled by the internets (generally older people) start to believe they need these products, because they hear over and over that someone’s out to get them.
Looking into the incident of the boor on the train led me to a blog called Facebookcheating.com. There people share their tales of woe and discovery, often blaming the technology for problems that are far deeper than a matter of tools — and even using the technology to play “gotcha” in situations where openness and acceptance would work better. The most recent entry had some points that, frankly, made me pretty scared, but reflect many of these “cheating discovery” episodes.
The founder of the website, for instance, writes:
I knew something was up and I tried reassuring her that I trusted her and she didn’t have to hide who or what she was chatting about. … I felt I couldn’t trust her and she didn’t want to talk to me about it so I started recording her chats with a keylogger.
I have to wonder who makes that kind of leap — from trying to talk to buying a piece of technology that records every keystroke made on a computer. I have to say I just can’t understand. And from the most recent entry, just a week or so ago, from another person:
We’re talking here about a heretofore honorable, moral woman. But she’s lying to me and to herself in a way. As I discover more, she’s angry that I’m invading her privacy. It amazes me that the pattern so often repeated is that the liar thinks she has standing to complain about privacy invasion … .
First, you cannot believe the most trustworthy of spouses in these situations. To protect yourself, you need to assume the worst …
I wonder whether, had I done something earlier to make our normal marriage better, I could have made her less vulnerable to what occurred. …
I’m not without compassion and don’t want to wrong someone who is being open with their story. I don’t want to do the same degree of exposure to someone whose unwitting that I’m complaining about. But this is anonymous and publicly posted, so I’m asking for a little deeper look here.
When it comes to people who go straight to the spy tools to check up on their alleged loved ones, I have to wonder if there was any intention to trust from the beginning. There is no sense that one’s own invasive behavior is just as “bad” as the cheating — there is, in fact, a sense that the man on the train and the woman chatting have surrendered their rights. These types of statements have the sound of someone who never really trusted to start with: “You need to assume the worst.”
I’m going to leave aside the scary references to “a heretofore honorable, moral woman” and “I could have made her less vulnerable to what occurred”; these are just more examples of denying the other individual their identity and agency, and the same respect one is demanding for oneself. In a way, this is the same argument many are making to defend the NSA spying: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about; if the spying makes us suspect you’re an evil cheating terrorist, you deserve to be violated (indefinite detention, force feeding, solitary confinement, etc.).
In the passion to nail the wrongdoer, the investigation and information gathering becomes an obsession of its own. You surrender your own humanity, respect and agency in denying others the same. Stare into the abyss, and the abyss stares back into you.
Getting really interested in the phenomenon of Snowden’s girlfriend’s job and activities being used to discredit him. Huge projection/jealousy thing happening there. A couple commentators have nailed it as a generational usurper thing, old men who held all the power now angry at a young man’s power and apparent prowess (to be able to “keep” “that kind of woman”). Lots of attempts to disempower and belittle both in the couple through labeling them as having various psychological problems. It’s precisely the kind of response they might have to their kids–he’s making trouble, medicate him. That this is the go-to reaction makes me very worried about the future. Anyway, just more to riff off what Eric and Amanda had in the subscriber version Friday about parent/child distrust dynamic.
I always wonder about folks like the person who put the “cheater” on FB. What motivated her to record the guy’s conversation and broadcast it on social media? Her action fascinates me.
Bingo, m’dear — “In the passion to nail the wrongdoer, the investigation and information gathering becomes an obsession of its own.”
That’s exactly what’s wrong with this blanket collection of data, it’s like silly putty — anything can be shaped from it … any case made, any innuendo implied, whatever they want to ‘read in’ to the basic comings/goings/purchases of the average citizen, which are infinitely more revealing than they sound. They won’t even WANT to read e-mails, lest they be proven wrong. And there’s the danger.
I don’t doubt they could prove any case they decide to construct, without the most rigorous oversight (which we ain’t got!). Who can we trust with such power in this day and age? If it was courts, the FISA court would be more than a rubber stamp.
And you’re right, there’s not much difference in the dynamics of the casual blogger/social critic and the sonorous lawmakers on the Hill. Ego’s unchained — squirrels in search of a nut.
The thing that’s really interesting, I think, is the warp and wobble of the sand American governance sits on, today — it’s getting harder and harder to consider ourselves the moral center of the Universe these days!
Excellent read, Maria. Thanks!