Musing about “sharing” and privacy

Over the last few years, with the continuing evolution of social media, there’s been a proliferation of tools that help people share information, experiences, opinions, even actions and status.  Devices have gotten “smarter” and more ubiquitous, and as a result, sharing has been made possible in more forms than before: audio, image, video and text. And, as the communications infrastructure has improved, it has meant that the things that get shared get shared more quickly.

During all this time, much has been written about privacy and confidentiality, and about the risks and dangers of sharing. I remember when the “semantic web” was beginning to get traction four years ago, there was an ACLU video that explained the “dangers” of “ordering pizza in the future”. When I had my heart attack and blogged about it, I was told how career-limiting that would be, how I would become unemployable as a result. More recently, we’ve had sites like PleaseRobMe, informing the world at large about empty homes using public signals and status information, in the hope that people will learn to be more careful about sharing such information.

It’s not just about the information people share as individuals, we’ve also had concerns about stuff we make available communally. Take this site for example: sailwx.info

A site that published the location and movement of ships. Fascinating, even mesmerising for some. And a godsend to Somalian pirates.

It doesn’t matter who’s telling the story, the moral has been the same. Sharing creates risk.  I want to talk about sharing.

1. Sharing is an inherently vulnerable act

It’s like this blog. Here I share what I think. By sharing what I think, I make myself vulnerable to you, the reader. And you can choose to comment constructively or destructively, to provide feedback, to withhold criticism or even praise. From my perspective, a blog with comments permanently closed is not a blog. You might as well have a marriage with a prenuptial agreement. Because what you’re doing is taking something that is about being vulnerable and trying to remove the vulnerability from it. Take legal separation. One of the ways that people define legal separation is by using the phrase a mensa et thoro, “from bed and board”. Sharing bed and board is a vulnerable thing to do. You’re at your most defenceless in those contexts.

2. Sharing is a state of mind, a mindset, a culture

I grew up in a Hindu Undivided Family in Calcutta, the eldest of five siblings. [So I’m a product of a patriarchal, male chauvinist society, on paper anyway….You wouldn’t dare use those words in front of my paternal grandmother, who passed away recently, in 2006. Patriarchal society indeed!] The extended family lived under one roof, and we shared everything. Our time, our interests, even our friends. As a teenager I would often come home to find that “friends of mine” had been there all afternoon, even though I’d been elsewhere. Because the friends were friends of the family, a shared resource. In such environments, sharing is in our blood. In the past year, I’ve seen every sibling, maybe half a dozen cousins, and every time I see them it feels like Yesterday Once More. This Christmas, a bunch of us are hoping to meet up in Calcutta, remember times past and have a rollicking time. You know something? We had rollicking times. Every day. Yes there were fights, yes everything wasn’t always sweetness and light, but in the main we’ve stayed very close. Because we were born that way, raised that way.

3. Sharing is about being in a covenant relationship

I’ve been brought up to believe that there are two types of relationship, covenant and contract. In a contract relationship, it’s all about privacy. The contract sets out separate recourse in the event of breach. The two parties in a contract are inherently separate. As against this, in a covenant relationship, it’s all about sharing. The covenant sets out what the people in the covenant do together when things go wrong. As I’ve said before, in a contract you answer the question “Who pays?”; in a covenant you answer the question “How do we fix this?”. Whenever I think about sharing, whenever I think about being in a covenant relationship, I am reminded of the words spoken by Ruth to Naomi in the Old Testament:

Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.  Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.

Now that’s what I call a covenant.

4. Sharing has its conventions and norms

It isn’t just privacy that comes with conventions and norms; sharing does that as well. Let’s take an example. In the West, in social circles, particularly amongst youth, I’ve seen bottles shared, passed on from hand to hand. And from mouth to mouth. This just wouldn’t happen in India, where there’s this concept of “thu”, when something has been touched by someone’s saliva. So when you passed a bottle from hand to hand in India, you would drink from the bottle without the bottle touching your lips or mouth. And this had to be done visibly and demonstrably. [This practice served me very well when I first had to drink a yard of ale].

Image taken from Wikimedia Commons and used on a CC-BY-SA-2.5 licence, attributed, with thanks, to Lee Tucker

5. Sharing needs to be done by design

The cultural conventions about sharing and not-sharing become even more interesting when it comes to food. In India it was common practice for me to be walking home from school or university and inviting five or ten friends to come home with me, joining the family for a meal. That’s part of what 6/2 Moira Street was about. On any given day, there were a dozen “guests” in evidence at home, sometimes more. Friends of the family, the extended family, neighbours. Some days it was the Rangaswamis’ turn, some days the Kapoors’, some days the Sillimans’. Different groups congregated on different floors and then meandered about from floor to floor, from flat to flat, interchanging seamlessly. And somehow the families coped, food never ran out. Cups of tea and coffee aplenty, snacks appearing as if by magic. A culture of hospitality. [Note: in order to protect the innocent all the names have been retained. You have been warned.]

And then I came to England. People were hospitable here as well, don’t get me wrong. I was received warmly, very warmly. But there was a difference, best described by example. Sometime before we got married (over 25 years ago) one day we were having guests for dinner. On the way home from work, I got talking to a friend and invited him to join us. This was before the days of mobile phones. So I turned up at home with an extra guest. Which was fine, except that dinner that night was steak. And the number of steaks equalled the number of original guests, with no spares. Which meant I had to “make up” a portion for myself by shaving bits off everyone else’s steak.

You see, I never had to face this in India. Because the dishes were naturally designed to be shared, to be extensible. You added a little more rice. Diluted the daal. Chopped a few more vegetables. Made a few more chapatis.

6. There is such a thing as oversharing

It’s been an interesting time these past years, playing around with social media. Tools for sharing have grown more sophisticated and more comprehensive as the concepts of  lifestreaming, and of what Clay Spinuzzi called ambient signalling, have evolved. It’s worth taking a look at what Nick Felton and gang have been doing, and at the services that have been spawned as a result, like Daytum.

Particularly when it comes to lifestreaming, there is such a thing as too much information; if you have the right feedback loops, you will find out soon enough. Because your signal will turn into noise, and the people you’re in touch with will tell you to turn the noise down. So you need to be careful when you share what you’re doing, that you don’t overload the sharing mechanism. It’s worth reading Danah Boyd’s writings on this subject: here’s an example.

7. Sharing involves sacrifice

I love the Wikipedia definition of sharing: Sharing is the joint use of a resource or space. In its narrow sense, it refers to joint or alternating use of an inherently finite good, such as a common pasture or a shared residence. Inherently finite. What a nice turn of phrase. I guess one of the most “inherently finite” things we come across is time. Our own time on earth. So we make choices with our time, there is an opportunity cost in its usage. [Incidentally, that is why, given its inherent “nonrival good” nature, it makes no sense to hoard information and ideas. But that’s a whole ‘nother ball game.]

8. There is accountability in sharing

I’ve always been struck by something Clay Shirky said about wikis, more particularly about why Wikipedia was successful: I paraphrase it as “if you can keep the cost of repair at least as low as the cost of damage, then good things happen.” Look at what happens with chewing gum and with graffiti, two things where the cost of damage is lower than the cost of repair. You see? Not everyone wants to share, there are selfish people about, and Hardin’s Tragedy of The Commons is a real thing. But people can be accountable in shared space, and this is something we need to learn more about and to encourage.

Which brings me to the whole point of this post.

Stewardship.

Otherwise known as accountability in a shared space.

Complex global issues: the eradication of poverty,  stopping malnutrition and disease, stabilising climate change, preserving our environment: these are not going to be solved by individuals acting alone with walls of intense privacy around them. They can only be solved by people working together in covenant relationships. They can only be solved by people making themselves vulnerable, people sharing, people acting responsibly and accountably.

Lifestreaming is also about democratised collection of data, the aggregation of minutiae about movement, weather, climate, food, whatever. In the same way as 17th century ships’ captains’ logs have given us insights into climate change, there is a lot we can learn about what’s happening around us by sifting through the apparently boring detail of our lives. In his TED talk, David Cameron spoke about Transparency, Accountability and Choice, and mentioned his intention to publish personal, average and “best of breed” details of carbon footprint, by household, as a means of effecting behavioural change.

Stewardship. It’s a collective thing. More about sharing than about privacy. We spend a lot of time worrying about privacy.

Time we spent the same amount of time worrying about sharing.

Stewardship.

18 thoughts on “Musing about “sharing” and privacy”

  1. Excellent read !
    re PleaseRobMe.com
    Sharing of information is not the only consideration, sudden changes in frequency of updates can also be an indication of being somewhere else, particularly if your travels make it impossible to tweet or update facebook etc. The US army have just lifted their twitter ban. How many other organisations that involve national security prevent social media updates while on deployment. were a drop in update rate can indicate someone is away…

    Conversely security agencies use sudden increases in “chatter” to indicate and impending event,

    Do we need a good update robot, the 21st Century equivalent to the table light and time clock ??

  2. Hi JP,
    Great article, one significant difference in what you describe is the degree of knowledge as to who the participants are. Sharing is often extended to friends of friends happily, eg meals and companionship, less to to total strangers. I agree the polarised viewpoint that things must be private or public is wrong headed. I’m sad that known participation shared systems like pownce didn’t catch on as they might have. Moving the discussion to one of what will you share and with who vs not sharing is a healthy one. A single company wiki is a more open environment that multiple semiprivate ones on different servers. In Building Social Web Applications I described the dominance of two types the public group and the private space. There needs to be a space in between where one can share to friends and friends of friends rather than this everyone or just a list. The real world has permeable social boundaries, we’ve not yet figured out how to create that on the web.
    thanks
    Gavin

  3. The eldest of five siblings? Me too. :-) My father was the dealer for Santosh and SRP radios for southeast Nepal in the mid 80s, I don’t know if those brand names ring bells, but they were out of Calcutta. Never been to Calcutta, some day.

    “As a teenager I would often come home to find that “friends of mine” had been there all afternoon, even though I’d been elsewhere. Because the friends were friends of the family, a shared resource.”

    The whole Web 2.0 and social media talk in the west as of recent, we have had it in the Indian culture pre-technology! There people are so in your face. Call it nosy, call it social.

    The same might apply to the environment. There are societies living is perfect equilibrium with nature for so long. Al Gore is not exactly a pioneer, although he has his place, and I feel sorry for the guy he got berated by an Apple stockholder recently: “You said the glaciers were going to melt away, but they are not melting!”

    You must be r-e-a-l-l-y excited about Christmas to be planning right now. Christmas was just over, I thought.

    The thing about food and hospitality. There is this schism about the rural and the urban right there in southeast Nepal. This was a long time ago. A rural relative of mine complained that when he went to see an urban relative “he only offered tea, and that was it!” The expectation was you would offer a full course meal, or you were not being welcoming, or at least “nasta” (snack).

    “[Note: in order to protect the innocent all the names have been retained. You have been warned.]”

    LOL

    In another tab right now I have open this Economist Special Report “A special report on managing information: Data, data everywhere.” Your blog post and the report kind of go together.

    ” Just as the microscope transformed biology by exposing germs, and the electron microscope changed physics, all these data are turning the social sciences upside down…”

    It only makes sense that a tech guy should be talking culture, as in anthropology.

    “Because the dishes were naturally designed to be shared, to be extensible. You added a little more rice. Diluted the daal. Chopped a few more vegetables. Made a few more chapatis.”

    Ha ha!

    “….accountability in sharing….”

    This phrase might be the nugget of this blog post. Social media makes it more possible. You are not just an anonymous number. It is like everyone who knows you is watching you. Most people don’t misbehave.

    “……the eradication of poverty, stopping malnutrition and disease, stabilising climate change, preserving our environment…”

    This is where the ball is out of the park. Chhakka mara! (That is a sixer). It is amazing how you move from the mundane and personal to the panoramic.

  4. thanks for the comments. yes, I am looking forward to being in Calcutta in December, seeing the rest of the brood.

  5. Great post as usual JP!

    I’ve always erred on the side of sharing and have taken the idea of stewardship inherently to heart (even though I never called it that). When I see (over)sharing on a site like Blippy.com (sharing your purchases) I wonder, “Wow…we are spending a lot of money on useless things and expensive meals out while others struggle to pay their rent and feed their kids. How can what we share on there show us a better way?”

    PleaseRobMe is the worst of all energy outputs imo. It feels like exploitation for the sake of sensation and gets all of the privacy junkies up in arms, “See?! See?!” Ugh. I’ll continue to use Foursquare because, well, I know the risk, but I’ve also lived the benefits. From having friends in the neighbourhood serendipitiously stop by to keeping a good tally of the places I go for future reference (“What was that great Thai restaurant that we went to that was really reasonable in mid-town Chicago? I’d love to let my cousin who is visiting there know about it.”

    I think you bring up the qualities of sharing that I find dear and advantageous for connection as well as those that take advantage of it that aren’t my favourite sides to the equation (but a reality). Concentrating on stewardship would definitely bring out more of the former and reduce the latter.

    On a side note, I was rather upset with David Cameron’s TED talk. Yes, he spoke of those amazing things, but it seemed he did so in order to support the notion of privatization…something I don’t think works in a world that LACKS stewardship (too many people wanting to exploit others for their own personal gain). I thought that he missed a big piece in that leap.

  6. Great stuff, and so relevant. A regular theme for me inside the enterprise these days is to dive into why this or that needs to be locked down. Rarely does it matter…it’s just what everyone used to do! It’s a lot of fun to bring the information into the community.

  7. Very nice rumination. Sharing is one of the greatest ironies of life. Sharing with strangers is often a gift, though sometimes an imposition. When sharing is a gift the key issue is whether we offer something for nothing. In the Enterprise context, offering something for nothing is almost a requirement to make sharing work since new project teams organize and disorganize rather quickly over time, often with little to no carryover in common membership. However, you can’t get reciprocity to work if no one makes the first move, and that means acting wtih beneficent motives.

  8. The “pleaserobme” site is an interesting example and the one for the Somali pirates even more so. It might even make me rethink my tweeting strategy but then again…
    If I am away from Twitter for a day then my online friends get worried. Might take a few days off soon to shock them

  9. @leanne Shel Silverstein. What a talented man. From songwriter (Sylvia’s Mother, A Boy Named Sue) to cartoonist (including for Playboy!) to children’s story and poem writer.

  10. Contracts or covenants, indeed. Reminds me of Shel Silverstein's poem Tug-O-War.
    I know which I prefer to enter into. Thank you for sharing these thoughts and illustrating them so beautifully. :)

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