La charla inaugural de la sección Interactiva del festival SXSW de este año corrió a cargo de Danah Boyd. Danah es una etnógrafa, una antropóloga digital que lleva años explorando, investigando y documentando las intersecciones entre nuestra vida real y nuestra vida digital, y las consecuencias que tienen para ambas dimensiones.
Una de las preocupaciones de Boyd es las percepciones de lo público y lo privado en nuestra participación en medios sociales, y cómo las clasificaciones en esos entornos de publicidad y privacidad muchas veces no se ajustan a nuestras expectativas.
By continuously arguing that Privacy is Dead, technologists justify their efforts to make publicly available data more public. But there’s a big difference between something being publicly available and being publicized. I worry about how others are going to publicize this publicly available Facebook data and, more importantly, who will get hurt in the cross-fire.
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Finally, I want to come back to what I keep raising briefly but not properly addressing. Just because something is publicly accessible does not mean that people want it to be publicized. Making something that is public more public is a violation of privacy.
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Wanting privacy is not about needing something to hide. It’s about wanting to maintain control. Often, privacy isn’t about hiding; it’s about creating space to open up. If you remember that privacy is about maintaining a sense of control, you can understand why Privacy is Not Dead. There are good reasons to engage in public; there always have been. But wanting to be in public doesn’t mean wanting to lose control.
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Each of you – as designers, as marketers, as parents, as users – needs to think through the implications and ethics of your decisions, of what it means to invade someone’s privacy, or how your presumptions about someone’s publicity may actually affect them. You are shaping the future. How you handle these challenging issues will affect a generation. Make sure you’re creating the future you want to live in.
Éstos son los extractos más interesantes de la charla, pero la conferencia entera merece una lectura calmada y atenta.