A key product of ubiquitous surveillance is people who are comfortable with it
Every now and then, due to some egregious blunder or blatant overreach on the part of government agencies or tech companies, concerns about surveillance and technology break out beyond the confines of academic specialists and into the public consciousness: the Snowden leaks about the NSA in 2013, the Facebook emotional manipulation study in 2014, the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the wake of the 2016 election. These moments seem to elicit a vague anxiety that ultimately dissipates as quickly as it materialized. Concerns about the NSA are now rarely heard, and while Facebook has experienced notable turbulence, it is not at all clear that meaningful regulation will follow or that a significant number of users will abandon the platform. Indeed, the chief effect of these fleeting moments of surveillance anxiety may be a gradual inoculation to them. In my experience, most people are not only untroubled by journalistic critiques of exploitative surveillance practices; they may even be prepared to defend them: There are trade-offs, yes, but privacy appears to be a reasonable price to pay for convenience or security.
This attitude is not new. In the late 1960s, researcher Alan Weston divided the population into three groups according to their attitudes toward privacy: fundamentalists, who are generally reluctant to share personal information; the unconcerned, who are untroubled and unreflective about privacy; and pragmatists, who report some concern about privacy but are also willing to weigh the benefits they might receive in exchange for disclosing personal information. He found then that the majority of Americans were privacy pragmatists, and subsequent studies have tended to confirm those findings. When Westin updated his research in 2000, he concluded that privacy pragmatists amounted to 55 percent of the population, while 25 percent were fundamentalists and 20 percent were unconcerned.
In a more recent study of attitudes toward privacy among older adults, Isioma Elueze and Anabel Quan-Haase expanded upon Westin’s taxonomy to include a category for what they termed the “cynical expert.” These individuals were better informed about privacy concerns than their peers but also tended to be more likely to share personal information. The findings corroborated a 2016 study of privacy attitudes and social media platforms by Eszter Hargittai and Alice Marwick that sought to better understand what they called the “privacy paradox”: the gap between reported privacy attitudes and actual privacy practices. Hargittai and Marwick suggested that the rise of privacy “cynicism” (or “apathy” or “fatigue”) was in part a function of the opacity of how social media platforms structure privacy settings and what users perceived to be the inevitable dynamics of what Marwick and danah boyd had, in a previous paper, termed “networked privacy.” In a network, they contended, the individual invariably cedes a measure of control over privacy to others within the network who have the power to share and publicize information about them without their consent.
That picture has been further complicated by the widespread adoption of the accouterments of the “smart home,” including internet-connected devices like Nest and AI assistants such as Amazon Echo or Google Home. Perhaps this development has been enough to push people from privacy cynicism toward what media scholar Ian Bogost, writing in the Atlantic, has described as full-blown “privacy nihilism,” which presumes an omnipresent regime of surveillance that we can no longer resist and may as well not bother to try. He points to experiences of what we might call the data uncanny — “someone shouts down the aisle to a companion to pick up some Red Bull; on the ride home, Instagram serves a sponsored post for the beverage” or “two friends are talking about recent trips to Japan, and soon after one gets hawked cheap flights there” — that have led users to erroneously conclude that their phones are listening in on their conversations.
As Bogost observes, this is not yet technically feasible, but the fact that this belief persists is itself revealing. Having surrounded ourselves with cameras, microphones, and a panoply of sensors, we now find ourselves enclosed in our own personal panopticon. It doesn’t matter whether anyone is actually watching or listening as long as we can’t be sure that they aren’t. Once the apparatus of surveillance is considered a fait accompli, then some measure of cynicism, apathy, or nihilism may present itself as the only reasonable response. It’s worth emphasizing, too, that this panopticon is experienced as personal: one whose boundaries are drawn close to the self and whose structures derive chiefly from consumer choices rather than government injunctions. The panoptic bubble we inhabit overlaps with what we have traditionally thought of as the private sphere, the sphere of the body and the home. In this way, it reinforces the sense that privacy is a private rather than public concern.
This all suggests the broader possibility that the pervasive presence of surveillance helps produce people who are more at ease with it — people who no longer know what privacy is for, or what socio-moral milieu could give it value. We may retain some memory of how the word is used, but we don’t know what it names. This development is, in part, an effect of habitually experiencing the self as mediated through the apparatus of surveillance. The subjective experience of operating within the field of surveillance has more bearing on our attitudes than detached theorizing about the capacities of the surveillance apparatus or the abstract ideal of privacy....MORE
