The Individual as Data Curator

            Hassan Elahi, Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, has a fascinating approach to privacy in the digital age: by flooding the internet with details of his personal life, Elahi “devalues the currency” of information which is so precious to government agencies such as the CIA and FBI. If 300 million Americans decided to share with the world every insignificant detail about their existence, the argument goes, then they would all gain a sort of anonymity because the government wouldn’t know how to process the torrent of data. However, while something like Tracking Transience might make information less valuable for entities who wish to engage in domestic spying, it also makes the same information less valuable for the end user – the people who decide to share their lives on the internet in the first place.

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            Facebook is one of the largest aggregators of our personal information. Our friend networks, personal photos, birth dates, and intimate thoughts are all more or less on display for everyone to see (and even if we designate our personal records as “private” on the website, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine the government getting ahold of everything, if it wanted to). Given the perceived state of internet privacy in the United States, we recoil when we imagine that all of this information might be out there for anyone with a computer and an internet connection to see.

But this information sharing and lack of privacy is what makes Facebook useful to its users. We want to keep up with our Facebook “friends,” and to the extent that we are their “friends,” we feel entitled to have a look into their lives. Imagine an acquaintance that runs into you on campus, excited to let you know that she’s gotten into her top choice grad school. “I already know that,” you think to yourself. “I checked Facebook ten minutes ago.” You, the savvy Facebook-user, are a true master of social interaction, armed with the foreknowledge of what your friends are going to talk about. Anytime and anyplace, you have a window into their lives, and they never know when you’re peering in.

Most college students have experienced the voyeuristic glee that comes from “Facebook stalking,” sifting through photos and news feeds of the quirky kid who sits next to you in class or the romantic interest you were introduced to at last Friday’s party. It’s the freely shared information that allows us to chart a clearer course throughout the dangerous waters of social interaction. Maybe the quirky kid shares some of your interests in music and literature, which can make for nice conversation fodder the next time you see him. Perhaps that romantic interest is already taken, which you find out after looking at her “Relationship Status” – good thing you didn’t embarrass yourself and ask her out.

The point is, part of the reason we value Facebook is because it’s easy to get a very personal look into someone else’s life, and then leverage relevant social information by using it to make informed decisions about our interpersonal interactions. But take a look at some of Elahi’s artistic work. The different frames in Security & Comfort v3 are absolutely banal, displaying all of the urinals and toilets where Elahi has been “doing [his] business, because they want to know about [his] business.” In Tracking Transience,  Elahi makes it clear that his purpose is to make his information user unfriendly to access, giving an ironic middle-finger to government snoops who waste his time with racial profiling, interrogations, and polygraph tests.  All of the data – and there’s a lot of data – is unnervingly specific, even to the point of offering the exact GPS coordinates of Elahi’s location. But at the same time, it is impossible to form any sort of coherent picture of Elahi as a person. He remains, in essence, anonymous(1).

Now imagine opening up Facebook and encountering the equivalent of Security & Comfort v3 or TrackingTransience for your 1,000 closest companions. This new Facebook with obscene amounts of personal information will have become, more or less, useless to you. One would hope that which urinal you chose to visit last night at coordinates 38.98 and -76.94 has no bearing on how I interact with you as a person – or any bearing on anything at all, for that matter. Furthermore, the anonymous feeling of Tracking Transience would defeat the purpose of a social network altogether. Networks are supposed to bring people closer together, not alienate them.

As we now know it, Facebook allows us to curate our lives in order to create an “online presence.” This presence is a portrait of who we are, or at least who would like to see ourselves as. And we interact with our friend’s portraits when we go online. Aside from the practical aspects of communication, this is why we like to use Facebook. But by rejecting his role as a curator, Elahi is refusing to contribute value to the users of social network platforms. He is refusing to paint a coherent self-portrait with which others can interact.

Far from being a negative judgment of Elahi’s piece, this conclusion raises a few interesting questions for the future of the internet (Unfortunately these questions are outside the scope of this blogpost. Perhaps they can be further discussed in the comments). People might have the same goals as Elahi, for example, but different means of achieving them. Instead of revealing all of their personal information, might individuals try to conceal as much information as possible when on the internet? What does it mean for the internet’s business model, which is based largely on advertising, when individuals make their data as hard to personalize as possible? Many more questions remain, and the future of data collection, both corporate and governmental, might depend on their answers.   

(1) Notice how there are no pictures of Elahi’s face in Tracking Transience. To me, this seems to be a greater contributor to anonymity than the huge volume of information.