This summer, two Dutch art projects should have caught the attention of anybody trying to understand privacy. The first project was I Love Alaska, a set of 13 mini movies. These mini movies consist out of the search queries one AOL user entered during a three month period. These queries were among the queries of 650.00 AOL users publicised by AOL for research. The movies show not only the queries, but also comment (a little) on them. They tell the tale of an unhappy, maybe slightly neurotic, woman who betrays her husband but doesn't get any happier from it. The movies are quite unnerving: they don't only show facts about the woman, but also give a deep insight in her feelings. It is not only unnerving to see what can be known about somebody, it is also unnerving because by watching these movies you become part of this act of privacy violation. You aren't supposed to know this.
The second project is the expostion It Could Be You. Two artists followed during two months the online activities of a young woman named Lot. They condensed all the information they found in one exposition room. They even rebuild her apartment (based on pictures Lot posted). Finally they invited Lot for the opening of the exposition. And while Lot was very much aware of all the information she did share and did not share, she was furious about this 'stealing of her live'. She felt (and still feels) violated
Of course, these two art projects raise the question whether it is allowed to violate somebodies privacy like this, even if it is an art project. But that is not the point I want to make here. I believe these two projects can teach us an important lesson, even though the artists might not have realized it themselves:
In both projects there was no privacy violation before the artists did their project. The violation started when the information about both woman was taken out of its context and introduced in a new context. Each art project created a bunch of new relations between its subject and new people. Existing relations were changed because of it. All of this because of the new presentation of the information.
The information changed from context and that violated the privacy. The judgement of the importance of the information somebody has about us is based on the relation to that person. Taking the information into another context and so changing the relations to other people equals violating privacy.
Privacy is not about what is known about us, but about what is done with that information