At a general level, there are four categories that defend people from privacy violations: the freedom of personal autonomy, the right to control personal information, the right to control personal property and the right to protect personal physical space. Despite the legal acknowledgement that there should be a fair expectation of privacy, understanding of today’s intrusive world suggests that privacy is no more a right, but a commodity entangled in trade relations.
The awareness that personal information is exchanged to get access to Internet services makes social media users follow the principle of self-violation of privacy through which they voluntarily provide personal data. People using social media platforms, in spite of the common suggestion to avoid disseminating personal information, are involved in a collective self-violation. They show themselves through their daily lives, presenting private data, addresses and contact details on social media that become, in this way, the public extension of private spaces, producing the virtualisation of fields that previously were extremely concrete and separate. Because online platforms encourage online activities (e.g. liking, sharing, posting, following, etc.), people’s presence on social media has consequently become more difficult to regulate, in particular in relation to moral and ethical issues associated to the way users’ information should be processed, who should have access to data and how this access should be regulated.
The mechanism that Internet services use to monetise users’ presence online centres around the monitoring and management of data and metadata. For instance, Lessig explained that users’ activity on Google is a gift for the company as much as it is something valuable for users. The company provides the product to the user and, at the same time, learns something during the process, in particular through the observation of users’ behaviours. He defined this system that traces users’ tastes for marketing as ‘little brother’ (reminiscent of the well-known ‘Big Brother’), a fundamental node of the new economy based on the exchange of benefits where the use of online services gives away access to personal data. The mechanism of online surveillance develops fruitful connections in relation to businesses and capital accumulation that Fuchs described through the concepts of ‘panoptic sorting, mass self-surveillance and personal mass dataveillance’. Following this, added that those who hold access to large data sets of personal information have a crucial tool that allows them to influence behaviours of those whose data are being held.
Digital World and Contradictions of Public Privacy
