#The Atlantic Best of The Atlantic publisher The Atlantic * Subscribe * Search * Menu Obscurity: A Better Way to Think About Your Data Than 'Privacy' * * * ____________________ (BUTTON) Close * Home * Latest * Most Popular * Magazine * Video * Photo * Writers * News * Politics * Business * Culture * Science * Technology * Health * Sexes * U.S. * Education * Global * Notes * Projects * Events * Books * Shop * Your AccountSign Out * Sign InSign Up [javascript] 2 Free Issues Try two trial issues of The Atlantic with our compliments. Claim now Follow * Facebook * Twitter * LinkedIn * Tumblr * Pinterest * RSS * App Store See our Newsletters > previousMy Dream College Won't Accept Me Because I'm a WomanThe Future of Medical Recordsnext story Obscurity: A Better Way to Think About Your Data Than 'Privacy' Obscurity is a protective state that can further a number of goals, such as autonomy, self-fulfillment, socialization, and relative freedom from the abuse of power. We noticed that you have an AD BLOCKER ENABLED Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways [large.jpg?1450107429] [large.jpg?1446761730] Subscribe Now > __________________________________________________________________ Sign up for The Atlantic Daily newsletter ____________________ [X] I want to receive updates from partners and sponsors. Sign up * * * * * * * * * Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger * Jan 17, 2013 * Technology Obscurity is a protective state that can further a number of goals, such as autonomy, self-fulfillment, socialization, and relative freedom from the abuse of power. 102029925_d14d2e8b69_b-615.jpg (tajai/Flickr) Facebook's announcement of its new Graph search tool on Tuesday set off yet another round of rapid-fire analysis about whether Facebook is properly handling its users' privacy. Unfortunately, most of the rapid-fire analysts haven't framed the story properly. Yes, Zuckerberg appears to be respecting our current privacy settings. And, yes, there just might be more stalking ahead. Neither framing device, however, is adequate. If we rely too much on them, we'll miss the core problem: the more accessible our Facebook information becomes, the less obscurity protects our interests. While many debates over technology and privacy concern obscurity, the term rarely gets used. This is unfortunate, as "privacy" is an over-extended concept. It grabs our attention easily, but is hard to pin down. Sometimes, people talk about privacy when they are worried about confidentiality. Other times they evoke privacy to discuss issues associated with corporate access to personal information. Fortunately, obscurity has a narrower purview. Obscurity is the idea that when information is hard to obtain or understand, it is, to some degree, safe. Safety, here, doesn't mean inaccessible. Competent and determined data hunters armed with the right tools can always find a way to get it. Less committed folks, however, experience great effort as a deterrent. Online, obscurity is created through a combination of factors. Being invisible to search engines increases obscurity. So does using privacy settings and pseudonyms. Disclosing information in coded ways that only a limited audience will grasp enhances obscurity, too. Since few online disclosures are truly confidential or highly publicized, the lion's share of communication on the social web falls along the expansive continuum of obscurity: a range that runs from completely hidden to totally obvious. Discussion of obscurity in the case law remains sparse. Consequently, the concept remains under-theorized as courts continue their seemingly Sisyphean struggle with finding meaning in the concept of privacy. Legal debates surrounding obscurity can be traced back at least to U.S. Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (1989). In this decision, the United States Supreme Court recognized a privacy interest in the "practical obscurity" of information that was technically available to the public, but could only be found by spending a burdensome and unrealistic amount of time and effort in obtaining it. Since this decision, discussion of obscurity in the case law remains sparse. Consequently, the concept remains under-theorized as courts continue their seemingly Sisyphean struggle with finding meaning in the concept of privacy. Many contemporary privacy disputes are probably better classified as concern over losing obscurity. Consider the recent debate over whether a newspaper violated the privacy rights of gun owners by publishing a map comprised of information gleaned from public records. The situation left many scratching their heads. After all, how can public records be considered private? What obscurity draws our attention to, is that while the records were accessible to any member of the public prior to the rise of big data, more effort was required to obtain, aggregate, and publish them. In that prior context, technological constraints implicitly protected privacy interests. Now, in an attempt to keep pace with diminishing structural barriers, New York is considering excepting gun owners from "public records laws that normally allow newspapers or private citizens access to certain information the government collects." The obscurity of public records and other legally available information is at issue in recent disputes over publishing mug shots and homeowner defaults. Likewise, claims for "privacy in public," as occur in discussion over license-plate readers, GPS trackers, and facial recognition technologies, are often pleas for obscurity that get either miscommunicated or misinterpreted as insistence that one's public interactions should remain secret. Obscurity received some attention when Facebook previously rolled out Timeline. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, for example, was dismayed by how easy the design made it to retrieve past posts -- including ones that previously required extensive manual searching to locate. Alas, the two dominant ways of discussing Graph have not had that same focus on obscurity. One narrative suggests that since Graph will only reveal information to users that was previously visible to them or publicly shared, it presents no new privacy issues. As Facebook hammered home, a user's original privacy settings are neither altered nor violated. According to Kashmir Hill, "Zuckerberg and crew emphasized the 'privacy awareness' of the new search engine." "You want a search tool that gives you access to just things that people have shared with you," said Zuckerberg. "I can only search for what I can already see on Facebook," added director of product management, Tom Stocky. "You can only search for the content people have shared with you," re-emphasized software developer Lars Rasmussen. Respecting Facebook users' privacy settings is no small feature, due to the harm that can result when privacy settings are given too little weight in socio-technical design. Thanks to the soothing message and intuitive appeal of the "self-selected insiders" narrative, many reporters are spreading its gospel. Wired and CNN, among others, note Graph doesn't expose any information that wasn't already available on Facebook. Ultimately, the "you choose who to let in" narrative is powerful because it trades on traditional notions of space and boundary regulation, and further appeals to our heightened sense of individual responsibility, and, possibly even vanity. The basic message is that so long as we exercise good judgment when selecting our friends, no privacy problems will arise. What this appeal to status quo relations and existing privacy settings conceals is the transformative potential of Graph : new types of searching can emerge that, due to enhanced frequency and newly created associations between data points, weaken, and possibly obliterate obscurity. Of course, that result won't bother everyone. Some users won't miss their obscurity havens, while others will find the change dismaying. As we'll clarify shortly, those who become dismayed will have good reason for being upset. The other dominant narrative emerging is that the Graph will simplify "stalking." Kashmir Hill states, "Good news for snoops: the new tool will make Facebook stalking much easier." Megan Rose Dickey wrote an article titled "Facebook's Graph Search Is Awesome For Stalkers And Hookups." While utilization of the "stalker" frame brings us a little closer to articulating what the harm from the Graph might be, it, too, is inadequate. First, the stalking frame risks creating undue psychological associations with the more severe harms of stalking, as legally defined and prohibited. Yes, we recognize these accounts use "stalking" colloquially. But words have power, and such deliberatively evocative rhetoric unduly muddies the already murky conceptual waters. Second, because of this, the stalker frame muddies the concept, implying that the problem is people with bad intentions getting our information. Determined stalkers certainly pose a threat to the obscurity of information because they represent an increased likelihood that obscure information will be found and understood. Stalkers seek and collect information with varying degrees of rigor. But as social search moves from an atomistic to composite form, many harms resulting from loss of obscurity will likely be accidental. Well-intentioned searches can be problematic, too. Obscurity is a protective state that can further a number of goals, such as autonomy, self-fulfillment, socialization, and relative freedom from the abuse of power. Consider the following hypothetical to demonstrate this point. Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that Graph is still in beta and many new features could be added down the road. It is not a stretch to assume Graph could enable searching through the content of posts a user has liked or commented on and generating categories of interests from it. For example, users could search which of their friends are interested in politics, or, perhaps, specifically, in left-wing politics. While many Facebook users are outspoken on politics, others hold these beliefs close. For various reasons, these less-outspoken users might still support the political causes of their friends through likes and comments, but refrain from posting political material themselves. In this scenario, a user who wasn't a fan of political groups or causes, didn't list political groups or causes as interests, and didn't post political stories, could still be identified as political. The Graph would wrench these scattered showings of support from the various corners of Facebook into a composite profile that presents both obscurity and accuracy concerns. The final reason the stalker frame is not a good fit for Graph is that it implies the harm at stake is the experience of feeling "creeped out." While the term 'creepy' isn't appearing as much as with other Facebook-related stories, it is still a non-trivial aspect of the Graph narrative. As one of us has previously posited, due to its vagueness and heightened emotional resonance, 'creepy' is not a helpful term to use when identifying the harm that might result from new technologies. Some of the chatter about Graph and privacy belies the optimistic belief that Facebook will not diminish too much obscurity in order to keep consumers happy and willing to post their lives away. Facebook regularly emphasizes the importance of users believing that posting on Facebook is safe. But is it really wise to presume Facebook's financial interests align with the user interest in maintaining obscurity? In a system that purportedly relies upon user control, it is still unclear how and if users will be able to detect when their personal information is no longer obscure. How will they be able to anticipate the numerous different queries that might expose previously obscure information? Will users even be aware of all the composite results including their information? Accurately targeting the potential harms and interests at stake is only the first step in the debate about Graph and other similar technologies. Obscurity is a protective state that can further a number of goals, such as autonomy, self-fulfillment, socialization, and relative freedom from the abuse of power. A major task ahead is for society to determine how much obscurity citizens need to thrive. * Continue Reading * Jump to Comments * About the Authors * * * * * * * * Latest Video [thumb_wide_300.jpg?1453474769] How America Trains Its Officers to Respond to School Shootings Inside the program that's preparing law enforcement for the rise in active shooting incidents * The Editors * 10:56 AM ET * Latest Slideshow [thumb_wide_300.jpg?1447874076] Peter Garritano In Photos: Inside the Internet Photographs of what “the cloud” actually looks like * Emily Anne Epstein * Jan 5, 2016 * About the Authors * [headshot.jpg] Woodrow Hartzog is an assistant professor at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law and affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. * [headshot.jpg] Evan Selinger is an associate professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology. + Twitter Most Popular Presented by * [javascript] Reuters Standing Athwart History Yelling, 'Stop Donald Trump!' + Conor Friedersdorf The National Review publishes the movement-conservative case against the Republican frontrunner. 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The stage is empty: vacated mics, cooling drum stool, the blocky, buzzing statuary of amps and speakers. Motörhead, the legendary Motörhead, is not there anymore. I’m in a heavy-metal hangar in Salt Lake City in late August, and singer/bassist Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister has just walked off, shakily and in evident distress, after only four songs, anxiously pursued by his drummer, Mikkey Dee, and guitarist, Phil Campbell. A man in a bandanna approaches me, pop-eyed with dire foreknowledge: “He’s not comin’ back, man! He’s not comin’ back! He’s too old!” Then he reels away, into the hormonal half-smoke and press of bodies in front of the stage. Should we riot? Are we sad? Is it possible that Lemmy—69 years old, pacemakered, diabetic—Lemmy, the great survivor, opposer, grizzled odds-beater, humanity’s middle finger, was crying? “Listen,” he’d said to us before exiting, in his familiar English roar-gasp, that voice of fiery exhaustion. “I’m really sorry—I can’t tell you how sorry I am—but my back’s gone. I’ve got this bad back and … I can’t breathe up here either.” Then he covered his face with his hands, and he left us. Continue Reading * [javascript] Carolyn Kaster / AP Milk, Bread, and Eggs: The Trinity of Winter-Storm Panic-Shopping + Joe Pinsker Why do people reliably stock up on the same things before they get snowed in? 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Bernstein / Reuters Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations? + Ta-Nehisi Coates The Vermont senator’s political imagination is active against plutocracy, but why is it so limited against white supremacy? Last week Bernie Sanders was asked whether he was in favor of “reparations for slavery.” It is worth considering Sanders’s response in full: No, I don’t think so. First of all, its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil. Second of all, I think it would be very divisive. The real issue is when we look at the poverty rate among the African American community, when we look at the high unemployment rate within the African American community, we have a lot of work to do. So I think what we should be talking about is making massive investments in rebuilding our cities, in creating millions of decent paying jobs, in making public colleges and universities tuition-free, basically targeting our federal resources to the areas where it is needed the most and where it is needed the most is in impoverished communities, often African American and Latino. Continue Reading * [javascript] Glory Foods / Flickr What's Leafy, Green, and Eaten by Blacks and Whites? + Conor Friedersdorf A tiny but illuminating controversy over collards. This is a story about how tiny things come to divide us. Fittingly, it begins with a Tweet. Last week, Whole Foods Market sent this to its 4.81 million Twitter followers: If you're not cooking with these greens, you need to be! How to cook collards: https://t.co/2lk2bMnKdS #HealthYeah pic.twitter.com/YqBPXg3uus — Whole Foods Market (@WholeFoods) January 14, 2016 One imagines a marketing staffer drafting the Tweet without apprehension or anxiety. Obesity is epidemic. Americans suffer from their unhealthy diets in myriad ways. Who could object to a supermarket cheerily touting a leafy green vegetable? Alerted to the Tweet by a foodie who asked me to explain why it was controversial, I looked at it, vaguely recalled that Michelle Obama had included a collard-greens recipe in her cookbook, American Grown, and asked if maybe the Red Tribe was giving the Blue Tribe a bit of ribbing about its affinity for plant-based diets? Continue Reading * [javascript] Stefano Rellandini / Reuters Sympathy for the Macklemore + Spencer Kornhaber “White Privilege II” bravely tackles difficult truths about race, but that doesn’t make it a good song. The third verse of Macklemore’s new song, “White Privilege II,” is from the perspective of a fan complimenting the 32-year-old Seattle rapper for hits like “Thrift Shop” and “Same Love.” Everything is copacetic and nice until the speaker—it’s Macklemore using a filter and multi-tracking to make it clear that this isn’t his voice—disses the rest of hip-hop: That’s so cool, look what you’re accomplishing Even an old mom like me likes it cause it’s positive You’re the only hip-hop that I let my kids listen to Cause you get it, all that negative stuff isn’t cool Yeah, like all the guns and the drugs The bitches and the hoes and the gangs and the thugs Even the protest outside—so sad and so dumb If a cop pulls you over, it’s your fault if you run Continue Reading * [javascript] Brian Snyder / Reuters Ted Cruz's Tithing Problem + Jonathan Merritt Many Christians believe God requires the faithful to donate a tenth of their income to charity. Will they vote for a candidate who doesn’t? Conservative critics of Ted Cruz are going after his tithing practices. According to recently released tax records, the Texas senator contributed less than 1 percent of his income to charity between 2006 and 2010. But many Christians believe that the Bible commands a charitable offering, or tithe, equal to 10 percent of one’s annual earnings. This discrepancy could end up making a difference less than two weeks before the caucuses in Iowa, a state where a Republican politician’s faith matters. And this is exactly what a newly formed political group, Americans United for Values, is hoping for. Today, the group is launching a 60-second radio advertisement on news, talk, and Christian stations across Iowa that raises the tithing question and labels Cruz a “phony”: “He doesn’t tithe?” a female voice asks in the ad. “Isn’t he a millionaire? His wife worked for a big Wall Street bank, right?” Continue Reading * [javascript] Carlos Javier Ortiz The Case for Reparations + Ta-Nehisi Coates Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole. And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today. — Deuteronomy 15: 12–15 Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation. Continue Reading * [javascript] Toby Talbot / AP The Decline of the Driver's License + Julie Beck Fewer people of all ages are getting them, and it’s not quite clear why. Remember how, in Clueless, Alicia Silverstone’s character Cher fails her driver’s test after nearly killing a biker and scraping her car alongside several parked cars? And then how she asks, “Do you think I should write them a note?” as she drives away? And then how, at the climax of the movie, her friend Tai (Brittany Murphy) calls her “a virgin who can’t drive” and it is just the harshest burn? Well, that was a fictionalized version of the ‘90s, and this is now. Things are different. Young people are not getting driver’s licenses so much anymore. In fact, no one is. According to a new study by Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, the percentage of people with a driver’s license decreased between 2011 and 2014, across all age groups. For people aged 16 to 44, that percentage has been decreasing steadily since 1983. Continue Reading * [javascript] NASA/NOAA What the U.S. East Coast's Massive Snow Storm Looks Like + Marina Koren and Adam Chandler From outer space down to the streets Updated January 22 at 2:10 p.m. EST That swirling cover of white up there is the first blizzard of 2016, captured by satellite on Friday as it barrels across the central United States, toward the East Coast. The “potentially crippling” storm is expected to bring powerful winds and up to two feet of snow to parts of the Mid-Atlantic this weekend, which could result in flooding in coastal regions, the U.S. National Weather Service warned. The storm has the makings of the “Big One” and so far appears “textbook,” according to the winter-weather expert who literally wrote the textbook on northeast snowstorms. As of Friday morning, more than 85 million people—or more than one in every four Americans—were covered by some kind of blizzard or winter-storm advisory, according to weather.com. Local, state, and federal officials have been scrambling to organize their responses to the blizzard as residents swarm grocery stores to stock up on food and water. As of Friday afternoon, there were already five storm-related deaths reported. Continue Reading * [javascript] The Most Powerful Images of 2015 + Greyson Korhonen and Alan Taylor A selection of the year's best photos Watch Video * [javascript] A Photojournalist Walks Away From His Profession + Nadine Ajaka How do you decide when you've seen enough of war? Watch Video * [javascript] Dennis Hlynsky / The Atlantic / Pearson Scott Foreman / Wikimedia Commons Revealing the Hidden Patterns of Birds and Insects in Motion + Sam Price-Waldman A video shows the dreamlike voyages of starlings, water striders, and more. Watch Video More Popular Stories Show Comments Subscribe Get 10 issues a year and save 65% off the cover price. 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