Public vs. Private

     Publicness: Is it a good or bad thing?  We have been studying Jeff Jarvis, author of Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live, and he says that our newer, public world is improving many things.  Some of those include collaboration, organization, and protection.  Those are very important ideals in any society, and Jarvis is saying that publicness, mostly through social media, is enhancing our society.
     On the other hand, a man by the name of Alessandro Acquisti has different thoughts on private information now becoming public.  He spoke at TED back in June of 2013.  His video - entitled Why Privacy Matters - is full of doomy studies that show some chilling ways our private information can quickly become not-so-private with modern technology.  There is some overlap between Jarvis and Acquisti, but they mostly disagree with each other.
     One of Jarvis’ main points in his chapter “The Benefits of Publicness” is all about how publicness protects us.  The very first line of his first paragraph he states, “The more public society is, the safer it is” (“Private Parts” 60).  It’s a crazy concept to think about – how could less privacy protect us?  We figured out in class that he is thinking that members of a public community can all be watchdogs to keep the community safe if they are more transparent with the information they share with each other.
     Acquisti has an immediate, alarming response as if he’s directly refuting Jarvis on the issue of publicness protecting us.  At about the 2:35 mark of the video he starts to explain two studies he conducted on students of Carnegie Mellon University.  I won’t explain the whole experiment because it does that in the video and I think it is very important and useful to watch the whole video in order to understand things I will be referring to later in this post.  Anyway, back to this point, he found ways to predict Social Security Numbers using facial recognition software combined with “Big Data” from social media.  All of which is available legally and for free online.  In Jarvis’ quote from page 218 he says, “We have the tools to do it,” meaning we’re able to share things.  However, Jarvis is looking at sharing/publicness through a positive lense, whereas Acquisti looks through a much darker lense.
     Another major point of Jarvis is found in the beginning of his chapter entitled “By the People.”  He takes up about six pages trying to convince us that the government and major corporations need to kill secrecy because transparency is the key to collaboration.  Now he of course is talking about preventing leaks in government organizations rather than preventing personal details from becoming public, but they are both major issues nonetheless.  Jarvis talks about how transparency is power and the truth will eventually come out.  He wants publicness to rule, but that is exactly what Acquisti is warning us about.
     He says that we’re headed for a “future without secrets” (5:00 Mark).  Meaning everything is going to be public.  His caveat to us is strong.  Just think if we were a completely public society – think about the stuff that would be accessible to everyone: Bank account numbers, all personal data, etc.  He brought an idea to light at the 5 minute mark of his video (I can’t link it because it’s not a YouTube video).  He says, “Imagine a future in which strangers around you will look at you through their 'Google Glasses'.... and use seven or eight data points about you to infer anything else which may be known about you.  What will this future without secrets look like?"  It’s an extreme, and even Acquisti acknowledges this, but it’s something that might not be far off.  And boy will it be weird when technology reaches that type of advancement.
     There is one thing that both authors seem to agree on, and that has to do with trade-offs.  Jarvis talk’s trade-offs back in his “Benefits of Publicness” chapter.  He says, “Trade-off is the word that often punctuates this discussion” (“Private Parts” 60).  Meaning that there are trade-offs when talking about privacy vs. security or private vs. public things.  Acquisti also accentuates this point.  He says, “Privacy is both the means and the price to pay for freedom” (12:45 Mark).  So, we have trade-offs by wanting more privacy and we have trade-offs if we want more publicness.  It absolutely works both ways.
     We spent a lot of time on Jeff Jarvis, a positive but potentially naïve author, and we got used to looking at publicness as the only way to advance society.  I found an excellent Ted Talk by Alessandro Acquisti that told the other side of the private vs. publicness story.  I learned that there is a slightly dark, unappealing side.  Publicness sounds great for collaboration, but Acquisti showed me through his experiments that publicness is not the answer for protection.