To remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, make the public square safe

ID cards didn’t do it. CCTV cameras didn’t do it. Not even the Terrorism Act could rouse the masses to indignant protest about the erosion of their privacy. But recently we learned something could: news that a company called Connectivity was to launch a new mobile phone directory so appalled the nation that the service’s website crashed under the weight of people opting out, and the service was suspended. “I’d find it quite intrusive actually,” said one woman stopped on the street by BBC’s Working Lunch, whose report ignited the protests. “I think whoever gets my mobile phone [number], I should be giving it to them.”

On the face of it, this outrage seems bizarre. Go back only 20 years, and almost everyone was happy to be in the phone book. Ex-directory used to be the exception; now an Englishman’s phone is his castle. Yet the same people who think it is an affront to privacy to give out a mobile number often think nothing of revealing their date of birth, relationship status, and much more intimate details on social networking sites.

What explains this paradoxical combination of opening up in some respects, and clamming up in others? An important part of the answer is that personal information is more ruthlessly commercially exploited than it used to be. You were in the phone book simply because you had a phone. You’re on Connectivity’s website, however, because someone was paid to hand over your number.

In the past we didn’t worry about ownership of contact details because they were not treated as property. Now they have become commodified, we quite naturally want to make sure that we, and not others, retain ownership.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data. In a strange way, social networks recreate a virtual version of what used to be the social reality, a place where we don’t mind people knowing how to get hold of us. But we are as paranoid in the real world as we are naive in the virtual one. Whereas we once trusted that information would not be abused, we now assume that it will.

The commodification of personal data is an often-overlooked factor in the erosion of community. It explains, in part, why society is becoming a collection of individuals vigilantly guarding their own individuality, suspicious of anyone who comes too close to it. This is the darker side of the cult of privacy, with its belief that privacy is a right that needs defending. That kind of privacy needs attacking. Privacy is indeed important, but if the private sphere grows, the public square shrinks. And as the etymology suggests, that is a privation.

That is why always focusing on defending privacy risks getting things the wrong way round. The priority should not be to defend the defence mechanism, but to neutralise the attack. We need solutions that go to the roots of the initial problem, ways of eliminating the fear that people have that, if they give an inch of personal information, someone will try to take a mile.

The priority should be to make the public square safe again, not to make the private realm more of a fortress. This means more robust rules on cold-calling and junk mail, which should both be explicitly on an opt-in basis only. It also means making it possible to go to physical public spaces without having to put up defence mechanisms: it should be illegal for anyone to accost you in a public area, for commercial or charity purposes. People should be enabled to put down their drawbridges without fear of trespass, not empowered to build more moats. We need to remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, and so address the cause, rather than the effect, of our private anxieties.

To remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, make the public square safe

ID cards didn’t do it. CCTV cameras didn’t do it. Not even the Terrorism Act could rouse the masses to indignant protest about the erosion of their privacy. But recently we learned something could: news that a company called Connectivity was to launch a new mobile phone directory so appalled the nation that the service’s website crashed under the weight of people opting out, and the service was suspended. “I’d find it quite intrusive actually,” said one woman stopped on the street by BBC’s Working Lunch, whose report ignited the protests. “I think whoever gets my mobile phone [number], I should be giving it to them.”

On the face of it, this outrage seems bizarre. Go back only 20 years, and almost everyone was happy to be in the phone book. Ex-directory used to be the exception; now an Englishman’s phone is his castle. Yet the same people who think it is an affront to privacy to give out a mobile number often think nothing of revealing their date of birth, relationship status, and much more intimate details on social networking sites.

What explains this paradoxical combination of opening up in some respects, and clamming up in others? An important part of the answer is that personal information is more ruthlessly commercially exploited than it used to be. You were in the phone book simply because you had a phone. You’re on Connectivity’s website, however, because someone was paid to hand over your number.

In the past we didn’t worry about ownership of contact details because they were not treated as property. Now they have become commodified, we quite naturally want to make sure that we, and not others, retain ownership.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data. In a strange way, social networks recreate a virtual version of what used to be the social reality, a place where we don’t mind people knowing how to get hold of us. But we are as paranoid in the real world as we are naive in the virtual one. Whereas we once trusted that information would not be abused, we now assume that it will.

The commodification of personal data is an often-overlooked factor in the erosion of community. It explains, in part, why society is becoming a collection of individuals vigilantly guarding their own individuality, suspicious of anyone who comes too close to it. This is the darker side of the cult of privacy, with its belief that privacy is a right that needs defending. That kind of privacy needs attacking. Privacy is indeed important, but if the private sphere grows, the public square shrinks. And as the etymology suggests, that is a privation.

That is why always focusing on defending privacy risks getting things the wrong way round. The priority should not be to defend the defence mechanism, but to neutralise the attack. We need solutions that go to the roots of the initial problem, ways of eliminating the fear that people have that, if they give an inch of personal information, someone will try to take a mile.

The priority should be to make the public square safe again, not to make the private realm more of a fortress. This means more robust rules on cold-calling and junk mail, which should both be explicitly on an opt-in basis only. It also means making it possible to go to physical public spaces without having to put up defence mechanisms: it should be illegal for anyone to accost you in a public area, for commercial or charity purposes. People should be enabled to put down their drawbridges without fear of trespass, not empowered to build more moats. We need to remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, and so address the cause, rather than the effect, of our private anxieties.

To remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, make the public square safe

ID cards didn’t do it. CCTV cameras didn’t do it. Not even the Terrorism Act could rouse the masses to indignant protest about the erosion of their privacy. But recently we learned something could: news that a company called Connectivity was to launch a new mobile phone directory so appalled the nation that the service’s website crashed under the weight of people opting out, and the service was suspended. “I’d find it quite intrusive actually,” said one woman stopped on the street by BBC’s Working Lunch, whose report ignited the protests. “I think whoever gets my mobile phone [number], I should be giving it to them.”

On the face of it, this outrage seems bizarre. Go back only 20 years, and almost everyone was happy to be in the phone book. Ex-directory used to be the exception; now an Englishman’s phone is his castle. Yet the same people who think it is an affront to privacy to give out a mobile number often think nothing of revealing their date of birth, relationship status, and much more intimate details on social networking sites.

What explains this paradoxical combination of opening up in some respects, and clamming up in others? An important part of the answer is that personal information is more ruthlessly commercially exploited than it used to be. You were in the phone book simply because you had a phone. You’re on Connectivity’s website, however, because someone was paid to hand over your number.

In the past we didn’t worry about ownership of contact details because they were not treated as property. Now they have become commodified, we quite naturally want to make sure that we, and not others, retain ownership.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data. In a strange way, social networks recreate a virtual version of what used to be the social reality, a place where we don’t mind people knowing how to get hold of us. But we are as paranoid in the real world as we are naive in the virtual one. Whereas we once trusted that information would not be abused, we now assume that it will.

The commodification of personal data is an often-overlooked factor in the erosion of community. It explains, in part, why society is becoming a collection of individuals vigilantly guarding their own individuality, suspicious of anyone who comes too close to it. This is the darker side of the cult of privacy, with its belief that privacy is a right that needs defending. That kind of privacy needs attacking. Privacy is indeed important, but if the private sphere grows, the public square shrinks. And as the etymology suggests, that is a privation.

That is why always focusing on defending privacy risks getting things the wrong way round. The priority should not be to defend the defence mechanism, but to neutralise the attack. We need solutions that go to the roots of the initial problem, ways of eliminating the fear that people have that, if they give an inch of personal information, someone will try to take a mile.

The priority should be to make the public square safe again, not to make the private realm more of a fortress. This means more robust rules on cold-calling and junk mail, which should both be explicitly on an opt-in basis only. It also means making it possible to go to physical public spaces without having to put up defence mechanisms: it should be illegal for anyone to accost you in a public area, for commercial or charity purposes. People should be enabled to put down their drawbridges without fear of trespass, not empowered to build more moats. We need to remove the need for people to defend their privacy so doggedly, and so address the cause, rather than the effect, of our private anxieties.