The Politics of Personal Information Privacy for the Facebook Age – Towards an Articulation and Assemblage Theory of PIP A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Lars Weise IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Gilbert Rodman, Ph.D, adviser May 2014 Copyright Acknowledgement “Culture is ordinary. […] We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life – the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning – the special processes of discovery and creative effort.” Raymond Williams, 1958 A dissertation is ordinary, too. Writing a dissertation is possible only because of the great number of people, who make up our lives. That is why I first thank my partner Hannah. Her willingness to live with me in a foreign country, to never doubt the reasoning behind my plans, her strength and her courage to engage even the most challenging situations, has been a daily inspiration. During the last four years I could always count on my parents's unquestioned support for this project, their patience and worldly wisdom. I own my confidence to them. My gratitude goes to both Hannah's and my family for their love and support, especially once our wonderful daughter Johanna Karlotta made focussing on academic work just a little bit more challenging. Finally, I would like to thank our friends in Minnesota for making our lives abroad enlightening, fun, and enjoyable. I was fortunate to benefit from the guidance and the acumen of a committee of exceptional and accomplished scholars. First, I thank my adviser, Gil Rodman, for his enduring support over the last four years. His insightful comments and his careful advise made this dissertation possible. His comprehensive, spot-on, and astute criticism has encouraged me to complete this dissertation. Gil's guidance provided me the much needed intellectual freedom to come up and carry-out a project that I truly own. Thank you to my committee chair, Mary Varvus, for her keen understanding of the intricate balance between academic commitments and commitments to family and friends. Over the course of three years, Mary's calm advise has helped to transcend the challenges that come with living 8000 miles away from your family. I am grateful for Karen Ho's commitment to this project, for her insightful and constructive critique. Karen's encouragement was of great importance when doubt loomed large. Finally, Laurie Ouellette's class “New Trends in Media Studies” has not only established my personal litmus test for graduate coursework, but it also inspired many ideas that shaped this dissertation. Laurie's critical interventions at various points in the process of conceptualizing this project are much appreciated. i Abstract Located at the intersection of privacy studies, media studies, and cultural studies, this dissertation challenges the notion of post-privacy and radical transparency. It argues for the reinvigoration of the political dimension of personal information privacy and challenges readers to scrutinize the ways in which journalists, politicians, Facebook officials, and scholars alike make it more difficult for ordinary people to define and negotiate for themselves the meaning and relevance of their personal information privacy. The first chapter looks at seven years of journalistic reporting, Facebook's data use policy as well as The White House Guidelines for Consumer Privacy. I argue that journalists, Facebook officials, and politicians alike overemphasize individual user control and technical options as solution to the complicated relationship between PIP and Facebook. I criticize that journalists make no or only superficial attempts to connect Facebook's privacy policy to larger contextual factors – either political, cultural, or economical. The second chapter investigates the economic dimension of the PIP discourse and examines more closely Facebook's SEC statements, Facebook's quarterly business reports as well as other internal documents, and newspaper articles from the The Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine. I argue that journalists provide a one-dimensional and trivializing account of the economy. The chapter demonstrates how journalists and prominent scholars help to perpetuate the myth of the technological sublime and, in so doing, render themselves involuntary allies to Facebook's misleading rhetoric of individual user empowerment. The third chapter attempts to correct the mistakes above and suggests first steps towards an articulation and assemblage theory of PIP. The chapter outlines how such a theory relies on the ordinary and pragmatic tradition of cultural studies while simultaneously introducing the notion of accountability for information. The final chapter applies the articulation and assemblage theory of PIP to the college class room. It discusses the foundations of a new PIP pedagogy, introduces a number of guidelines and exercises for the classroom, and discusses a variety of readings that address the issue of PIP in a network culture. The chapter culminates in a syllabus that is designed with a college class room in mind. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements …................................................................... i Chapter 1: Introduction …........................................................................…... 1 Chapter 2: Don't Blame the User – it's Context, stupid! …............................. 18 Chapter 3: Politics of Privacy meet Shareholder Culture ….......................... 65 Chapter 4: Towards an Articulation and Assemblage Theory of PIP ................ 103 Chapter 5: Teaching PIP – Introducing a New Curriculum............................. 140 References …................................................................................. 182 ii Introduction In 1890, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis published an article for the Harvard Law Review titled “The Right to Privacy” in which both authors contemplate the relationship between communication technology and the basic civil right to privacy. Warren and Brandeis were not the first to contemplate the conditions that shape our expectations and tastes for privacy. However, their essay describes the beginning to what would become a substantial body of literature about the legal dimensions of privacy. To this day, their essay “The Right to Privacy” remains the second most-cited law review article of all time1. Roughly 125 years ago, Warren and Brandeis lamented how their right to be alone and thus, their ability to execute the right to “exercise extensive civil privileges”, was under the attack from a new technology – instantaneous photography – and a burgeoning newspaper enterprise. The disruptive potential of new communication technologies marked, Warren and Brandeis complained, “an invasion upon his (sic) privacy, subjected him (sic) to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury”2. At the current conjuncture, some challenge Warren's and Brandeis's urgent plea for the relevance of privacy. Sun Microsystems's CEO Scott McNealy's stated: “You have 1 Fred R. Shapiro and Michelle Pearse “The Most-cited Law Review Articles of all time” Michigan Law Review 110. p.1489. 2 Samuel D. Warren and Louis D.Brandeis “The Right to Privacy” Harvard Law Review IV.5 1890. <http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html> 1 zero privacy anyway. Get over it”3. Others conclude that “privacy is dead”4. Finally, Facebook's CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg proposes “radical transparency”5 as a new paradigm eventually leading to a more “'open and transparent world', [where] people will be held to the consequences of their actions and be more likely to behave responsibly”6. Yet another group of privacy skeptics suggest that the term post-privacy best captures our contemporary relationship to personal information. The concept of post- privacy has received much attention as it tries to capture, to struggle with, and to deal with our alleged new information reality – assuming that we, indeed, live in such a new context. The German post-privacy advocate Michael Seemann outlines the basic principles of such an approach: The concept of post-privacy understood is the realization that certain assumptions, ideas, and expectations about privacy from the analogue world no longer fit the new networked and digital world. Therefore, post-privacy is an invitation to discuss these ideas and to formulate alternatives7. This dissertation challenges the notion that post-privacy provides a meaningful alternative and argues that it is too early to close the books on the concept of personal information privacy. I acknowledge and discuss at length that the concept of privacy is in and of itself “in disarray”8, highly “fractured, ambiguous, perhaps even incoherent”9. However, I argue that the case study of Facebook makes clear how personal information 3 Quoted in Julie E.Cohen Configuring the Networked Self p.11. 4 Daniel J. Solove in his book Understanding Privacy provides a comprehensive overview of the many claims about the alleged death of personal privacy. See pages 3 to 5 and for citation information notes 23 through 29. 5 Mark Zuckerberg quoted in David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect p.200. 6 Ibid. 7 Michael Seemann ctrl+verlust my translation March 23, 2011. <http://www.ctrl-verlust.net/was-ist- postprivacy-fur-mich/> 8 Daniel J. Solove Understanding Privacy p.1. 9 Helen Nissenbaum Privacy in Context p.2. 2 privacy has become one of the principle battlegrounds