Someone described the act of watching Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifying before Congress as “low level self-harm”. In this post, Joe Edelman explains why:

Zuckerberg and the politicians—they imagine privacy as if it were a software feature. They imagine a system has “good privacy” if it’s consensual and configurable; that is, if people explicitly agree to something, and understand what they agree to, that’s somehow “good for privacy”. Even usually-sophisticated-analysts like Zeynep Tufekci are missing all the nuance here.

Giving the example of a cocktail party where you're talking to a friend about something confidential and someone else you don't know comes along, Edelman introduces this definition of privacy:
Privacy, n. Maintaining a sense of what to show in each environment; Locating social spaces for aspects of yourself which aren’t ready for public display, where you can grow those parts of yourself until they can be more public.
I really like this definition, especially the part around "locating social spaces for aspects of yourself which aren't ready for public display". I think educators in particular should note this.

Referencing his HSC1 Curriculum which is the basis for workshops he runs for staff from major tech companies, Edelman includes a graphic on the structural features of privacy. I’ll type this out here for the sake of legibility:

  • Relational depth (close friends / acquaintances / strangers / anonymous / mixed)
  • Presentation (crafted / basic / disheveled)
  • Connectivity (transient / pairwise / whole-group)
  • Stakes (high / low)
  • Status levels (celebrities / rank / flat)
  • Reliance (interdependent / independent)
  • Time together (none / brief / slow)
  • Audience size (big / small / unclear)
  • Audience loyalty (loyal / transient / unclear)
  • Participation (invited / uninvited)
  • Pretext (shared goal / shared values / shared topic / many goals (exchange) / emergent)
  • Social Gestures (like / friend / follow / thank / review / comment / join / commit / request / buy)
The post is, of course, both an expert response to the zeitgeist, and a not-too-subtle hint that people should take his course. I'm sure Edelman goes into more depth about each of these structural features in his workshops.

Nevertheless, and even without attending his sessions (which I’m sure are great) there’s value in thinking through each of these elements for the work I’m doing around the MoodleNet project. I’ve probably done some thinking around 70% of these, but it’s great to have a list that helps me organise my thinking a little more.

Source: Joe Edelman