Week 1 - Privacy In Public

Question 1

Which are the instrumental and non-instrumental justifications for democracy?

Answer 1

Instrumental: economy, peace, the quality of decision-making
Non-instrumental: freedom, autonomy, equality

Question 2

What are arguments for open voting?

Answer 2

Accountability towards one’s fellow citizens and towards others whose interests might be affected by your vote. Encourages voting according to the common good rather than one’s private interests.

Question 3

What are arguments for a secret ballot?

Answer 3

A secret ballot prevents pressure from powerful actors/ peers

Question 4

Public deliberation =

Answer 4

The basis for democratic decision making. Oriented towards the common good, finding common ground. Improves individual views and public opinion.

Question 5

What is a pro of private discussion that public deliberation does not have?

Answer 5

Private discussions can bring out information or considerations that are more relevant and less shallow

Question 6

What does Article 12 (UN) say?

Answer 6

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence (…) Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks

Question 7

What does Article 8 of the ECHR say?

Answer 7

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic wellbeing of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others

Question 8

Which are the two classic definitions of privacy?

Answer 8

1. Not accessible (Reiman, Robin Crusoe)
2. Control Access (Westin, Roessler)

Question 9

What is the value of privacy?

Answer 9

• Decide for ourselves with whom we do or do not want to share our information, our lives and our home
• Make your own decisions
• Being able to regulate and reasonably estimate who has access to what information about me

Question 10

Why do we value privacy?

Answer 10

Because we value freedom/ autonomy

Question 11

What (4) democratic values does privacy have?

Answer 11

1. Protects a free society
2. Surveillance makes you vulnerable to conformism, manipulation and discrimination
3. Privacy provides a counterbalance to a healthy balance of power in a liberal democratic constitutional state
4. Privacy may also protect disadvantaged groups

Question 12

What did John Stuart Mill say on autonomy and politics?

Answer 12

• A flourishing democracy needs critical, engaged citizens, which privacy helps create and protect
• Surveillance is at tension with this (see Stahl)
  -> therefore, privacy should be a democratic right
  E.g.: government surveillance and surveillance capitalism

Question 13

What does government surveillance of political, public activities constitute according to Stahl?

Answer 13

‘[Government] surveillance [of political, public activities] constitutes a form of exercise of political power over the public sphere that is incompatible with the idea of democratic self-determination.’

Question 14

What is surveillance according to Stahl?

Answer 14

A form of relationship-shaping political power

Question 15

What does free deliberation in the public sphere require?

Answer 15

A free interchange of information and arguments and the freedom to shape relationships within which we do this. This is not an individual but a collective, democratic interest: shaping how we organize ourselves politically, what we discuss with whom and in what ways.

Question 16

What is surveillance capitalism?

Answer 16

A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales. According to Zuboff: a rogue mutation of capitalism .. a significant threat to human nature.

Question 17

Big Other =

Answer 17

An ubiquitous networked institutional regime that records, modifies, and commodifies all kinds of everyday behaviour with a view to establishing new pathways to monetization and profit.

Question 18

What makes surveillance capitalism different from regular capitalism?

Answer 18

In theory, in a liberal democracy, the market should meet the real needs of a society, but surveillance capitalism is no longer interested in the needs of societies or states at all:
- No tangible relationship with their customers or employees, data extraction takes place remotely;
- You can no longer escape the power and monitoring of these companies that can use the data to guide your behaviour;
- Services are personalized and tell you what you want before you even know it;
- The technological infrastructure allows companies to constantly experiment with an intervene in people’s lives

Question 19

Summarize the difference between Big Other and previous powers

Answer 19

• No escape (as with the panopticon)
• Not centralized (as with the government)
• Asymmetric: knowledge/ power
• Anticipatory conformity -> automaticity

Question 20

Why is Big Other a threat to liberal democracy according to Zuboff?

Answer 20

Because it threatens people’s right to self-determination - in their private lives, their social relationships in politics and governance.

Question 21

Which four new ‘uses’ have followed from computer-mediated transactions?

Answer 21

1. Data extraction and analysis
2. New contractual forms due to better monitoring
3. Personalization and customization
4. Continuous experiments

Question 22

Internet of Everything =

Answer 22

Growing network of smart sensors and internet-enabled devices intended as a new intelligent infrastructure for objects and bodies

Question 23

Infrastructure imperialism =

Answer 23

E.g. Google does not ask if it can photograph homes for its databases. It simply does. It then exhausts its adversaries in court or eventually agrees to pay fines that represent a negligible investment for a significant return.

Question 24

Everydayness =

Answer 24

‘Big data’ are constituted by capturing small data from individuals’ computer-mediated actions and utterances in their pursuit of effective life.

Question 25

The un-contract =

Answer 25

Varian: We can now observe behaviour that was previously unobservable and write contracts on it. E.g. if someone stops making monthly car payments, the lender can ‘instruct the vehicular monitoring system not to allow the car to be started and to signal the location where it can be picked up. People agree to this invasion of privacy if they get something they want in return. Surveillance Capitalism establishes a new form of power in which contract and the rule of law are supplanted by the rewards and punishments of a new kind of invisible hand.

Question 26

Why can what Big Other is doing be better described as a coup des gens than a coup d’etat?

Answer 26

Because it is an automated coup from above. Big Other exists in the absence of legitimate authority and is largely free from detection or sanction.

Question 27

Reality business =

Answer 27

A new business frontier comprised of knowledge about real-time behaviour that creates opportunities to intervene in and modify behaviour for profit.

Question 28

Why are experiments continuously done on users?

Answer 28

They are done with a view to eventually monetize its knowledge, gain predictive capabilities and control

Question 29

Which three fictional commodities did the possibility of industrial capitalism depend upon? Which is the fourth coming in now?

Answer 29

1. Human life can be subordinated to market dynamics and be reborn as ‘labour’
2. Nature can be subordinated and reborn as ‘real estate’
3. Exchange can be reborn as ‘money’
4. Reality is subjugated to commodification and monetization and reborn as ‘behaviour’

Question 30

What are the purposes of knowing, controlling and modifying behaviour?

Answer 30

To produce new varieties of commodification, monetization, and control.

Question 31

In what way(s) does surveillance capitalism undermine the historical relationship between markets and democracies?

Answer 31

It is formally indifferent to and radically distant from its populations. It is immune to the traditional reciprocities in which populations and capitalists needed one another for employment and consumption. Rather, democracy threatens surveillance revenues.

Question 32

Which issues are raised by indiscriminate mass surveillance technologies?

Answer 32

1. They have unprecedented scale
2. There is a separation between two senses of surveillance; surveillance in the sense of information capture and storage and in the sense of access to information

Question 33

Why is privacy valuable for society?

Answer 33

Privacy not just protects individual freedom of action but also safeguards certain forms of social interaction. It is control over information sharing that enables people to engage in different roles (e.g. civil inattention).

Question 34

What happens if communications in the public sphere are subject to surveillance?

Answer 34

Most members of the public lose the ability to control their social relationships to other members leading to a change of the character of the relationship constitutive of the public sphere. This is an exercise of political power.

Question 35

What does mass surveillance constrain if not individual liberty?

Answer 35

Collective self-determination because individuals typically do not have the right to determine who can be a member of the various groups they move in.

Question 36

How does Habermas describe the public sphere?

Answer 36

As a collection of practices that regulate themselves on the basis of norms that aim at generating consensus through argumentative agreement rather than trough strategic threats and sanctions.

Question 37

What is autonomous collective control over the relationships constituting not only one but multiple public spheres a precondition for?

Answer 37

The participation of both the majority and minorities in democratic self-government.

Question 38

How can collective interest in self-determination be safeguarded?

Answer 38

By exempting political public spheres from surveillance.

Question 39

Why is indiscriminate mass surveillance incompatible with the idea of democratic self-determination?

Answer 39

Because it not only threatens individual liberty and non-domination and undermines valuable non-political relationships, but it also constitutes a form of exercise of political power over the public sphere. Indiscriminate surveillance of political, public activities removes the option for participants of the public sphere to collectively determine what social relations are appropriate for this sphere and it thereby limits their ability to exercise collective communicative freedom.

Question 40

Why is not only the use but also the mere gathering of information problematic (in the context of the public sphere)?

Answer 40

Because the gathering of information changes the environment of social relationships and thereby undermines collective self-determination.

Question 41

Which four interests in privacy do individuals have according to Patricia Boling?

Answer 41

1. Interests in protecting the spontaneity, openness and trust that nurture intimate and loving relationships;
2. Interests in freedom from ‘Big Brother’, or over-weaning, intrusive and paternalistic government;
3. Interests in protecting and respecting diversity;
4. Interests in experimentation ‘as we develop intimate relationships with others’

Question 42

What are the (3) essentials of democracy?

Answer 42

1. That it protects the freedom and equality of individuals;
2. That all individuals who are bound by the laws of a democracy are, in principle, entitled to participate in determining those laws;
3. That in a democracy individuals will have civil rights and socioeconomic rights, as well as political rights, although the precise boundaries among these different types of rights may be controversial

Question 43

How can we define political rights?

Answer 43

As rights of political choice, association, expression, using ‘collective’ as a synonym for ‘political’ where that would be helpful

Question 44

How can we define privacy rights?

Answer 44

As rights of personal choice, association and expression

Question 45

How is collective communicative freedom imposed on and limited by indiscriminate surveillance of political, and public activities?

Answer 45

Because it removes the option for participants of the public sphere to collectively determine what social relations are appropriate for this sphere