A Rehydrated Understanding of #Privacy by Meredith Whittaker

[Music] a rehydrated understanding of privacy needs to take these lessons seriously to take seriously the role of Love intimacy desire and learning in forming new worlds that rudely and wonderfully reject established orders and to figure privacy as the necessary condition that enables and protects these but to do this our understanding of privacy needs to go beyond data it must confront epistemic Authority headon confronting the forces that claim the right to Define our world on behalf of the rest of us who are figured the rest of us who are figured as objects of this knowledge not producers of it it's here where the dry data Centric privacy paradigms common in Tech fail us most drastically because once the data is created the question of who gets to Define me has already been answered no no I don't want to own my Facebook data I want to disavow Facebook as an Arbiter to reject Facebook's right to any claim to know me and my people and the type of person I am to begin with yes I want to retain the right to fall in love drastically to change my mind wildly based on new knowledge that scrambles paradigms and Common Sense and to forge and sever relationships and move toward messy no guarantees transformation toward truly new understandings and communities I want this for all of us but without a focus on epistemic Authority even privacy arguments against creating and collecting data can end up reaffirming the power of tech to Define us especially when they argue that data limitation is necessary due to such data's accuracy or sensitivity because this argument ultimately implies that data is a proper and accurate way to know us to begin with but that such knowledge should not be in the hands of one or another party by taking data as a given and contesting only who has the right to it we naturalize and and affirm the companies and institutions that create it as that create it we naturalize them as rightful Arbiters of us and our world but exactly did we give a few companies the right to Define who we are with more Authority than we have right so a meaningful definition of privacy needs to start before data it needs to incorporate a much more fundamental understanding of the right to privacy as the right to Define ourselves in our own terms to practice and experiment with the mess making forces of Love intimacy desire and knowledg making and a right to the unobserved epistemic space in which wish to do this [Music]