SPIR AoIR Abolish Privacy LIM Selected Papers of #AoIR2023: The 24th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers Philadelphia, PA, USA / 18-21 Oct 2023 REVOLUTIONARY TACTICS: ABOLISH PRIVACY This paper addresses internet scholars who promote online privacy. This paper rejects privacy as a neoliberal agenda. 1. Privacy is not Social Justice Corporate online platforms are built on racial capitalism, to quote Cedric Robinson, designed to make profit by marginalizing Blackness. Black, working class, Indigenous, refugee, disabled communities are further marginalized by automated health care (Cruz 2022), policing (Brayne 2020), welfare qualifications, refugee status (Molnar and Gill, 2018), democratic voting rights (Noble 2018), and access to information seen in Meta’s current restrictions on documenting Palestinian casualties. Privacy will not protect us from these harms. However many excellent alternatives have been proposed, for example in a study of predictive policing (Dixon-Roman, Nyame-Mensah, Allison Russell 2019): First, they call for the decriminalization of poverty and self-defense, and instead, a focus on the far more socially expensive problem of white collar crime. Second, they call for data audits, so that individuals can object to attributes generated by racist training data. Third, they call for a turn of the predictive gaze instead onto the perpetrators by training AI to forecast excessive violence by the police and military. Fourth, they ambitiously but crucially call for the dismantling of the category of human, which excludes Black people and demotes Indigenous, disabled and queer people not by mistake but by design. These authors invoke the Black Radical tradition, Robinson’s thesis that the reduction of Black people to private property is the basis of capitalism. In his urgent 2020 political pamphlet On Property, Rinaldo Walcott argues that private property justifies carceral systems and the un-privacy of a caged class (Walcott, 2020; Hill 2016). In Dark Matters, Simone Browne shows how surveillance is born out of the selective deprivation of Black privacy and the desire to claim Blackness as the private property of whiteness. Whiteness as Cheryl Harris reminds us, is the only basis of private ownership. Unprivacy is fundamental to able bodied supremacy, as Crip theorist Mia Mingus (2017) writes, forcing disabled people into intimate disclosures on a daily basis as a requirement for basic needs and access. Queer theorist Laurent Berlant argues that Suggested Citation (APA): Lim, E. (2023). “Abolish privacy.” Panel presented at AoIR 2023: The 24th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. Philadelphia: AoIR. Retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. 2 constitutional American “personhood” is historically defined by the ownership of slaves within a private realm; privacy that protects nobody from the abuse of white men (p. 18). Critical race, feminists, queer and crip theory relentlessly problematizes privacy as an ideology. Activists must not invoke the specter of privacy in our efforts to shield and care for each other. Our resistance movements have always called for its opposite: interdependence and collective solidarity, or to quote Wendy Chun (2014), the right to be vulnerable online. She cites the Toronto slutwalk, as well as South Asian feminist activists fighting gender-based violence. These women call for the right of marginalized communities to take risks in public without facing violence. To Quote Chun, “rather than fight for privacy—for hermeneutic bubbles of protection—we need to fight for the right to loiter.” 2. Privacy is inextricable from private property. One might argue that calls for online privacy are not the same as calls for private property, but in the discourse surrounding online privacy, this distinction is not made. This is the result of several critical discourse analyses of mainstream privacy rhetoric concluding that privacy narratives focus on customer rights, government and corporate transparency, and threats to democracy (Connor and Doan, 2021). McDonald and Forte complement these findings with a discourse analysis of blog posts written by the newsrooms of Meta and Snapchat, which strive to shape media privacy rhetoric towards a focus on personal authenticity, safety and data impermanence; in other words the assertion and expansion of private property. David Carroll’s words especially alarmed broad audiences in his opening lines of Netflix documentary The Great Hack, “All of my interactions… all collected in real time and attached to my identity, giving any buyer direct access to my emotional pulse” (The Great Hack, 2019). Wired Magazine called the documentary a “horror movie” that “brings our data nightmare to life” (Dreyfuss, 2019). However in media appearances that year, Carroll made a concerted effort to temper those words, and in fact, critique the documentary’s overall message (Fischer, 2019), “My pursuit [in the film] is a highly individualized narrative, which obscures the reality that it's a story about all of us…it does require a collective response. Data protection is a structural problem” (Fischer, 2019). Carroll emphasizes that data infractions are not about individual privacy. Nevertheless, the film spread a contagious nightmare of defenseless personal property online. This moment inaugurated Facebook’s grandiose pivot to privacy, when Mark Zuckerberg happily announced at F8 conference that year, that “the future is private,” touting new Facebook resources like “Control Who Can Find You,” “Abuse Resources” and other frightening titles that serve to raise fears of dangerous invaders that only Meta can stop through securitization and corporate biometrics. Even though at the same time research shows that increased corporate securitization does not work (Wolff, 2019), surveys found that these privacy settings made people feel secure (Torres & O’Brien, 2012) in a deliberately provoked atmosphere of danger. 3 It is no coincidence that these securitization measures further marginalize vulnerable communities. For example two-factor authentication that requires two fully charged, updated, working devices with fully paid off monthly bills; or byzantine platforms whose complicated permissions exclude users due to language or neurological barriers. As these security measures are expanded throughout privatized platforms in health services, rental agencies, welfare, social media platforms and more, they claim to efficiently reduce organization workload by in fact locking out significant numbers of vulnerable stakeholders, as Shoshana Magnet has shown. 3.Online “privacy” is a myth. Online privacy is neither possible nor desirable. In her book Updating to Remain the Same Wendy Chun points out that the nature of the internet is computers that are “engaged in constant, incessant, and promiscuous exchanges of information” (2016, p. 107). Meta's security claims are fruitless defenses against the promiscuous circulation of marketing, cyberbullying, violence, and as Maggie McDonald shows, CSAM or Child and Sexual Abuse material that happens inside closed networks of so-called “friends.” Social media is not really social, it is a decision support system for flagging market trends. Activist academics like Zeynep Tufecki (2018) repeatedly show how misinformation is spread between like-minded networks. Social media privacy measures will never interfere with marketing, and hate is abundantly marketable. 4.“Privacy” is a historic device for designating morally upright sex and policing and punishing its deviations. Privacy is a colonial legacy that produces, polices and enforces the limits of heteronormative decency. Today, contemporary U.S. notions of broader cis-heterosexual “privacy” entitlements expose transgender communities to danger: required to frequent bathrooms in accord with their sex assigned at birth and subject to mandatory disclosure in order to access healthcare services and obtain government services including government-issued identification (Ringrose, 2020). Privacy is not social justice, neither for consumer protection, which is disingenuous, nor for marginalized communities, whose problems are systemic. 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