Cryptography

Public discourse around privacy often centers on hiding or opting
out of public environments, whereas scholars and engineers often
focus more on controlling the flow of information. These can both be
helpful ways of thinking about privacy, but as philosopher Helen Nissenbaum astutely notes, privacy is always rooted in context  (Boyd 60).

In this quote from It’s Complicated, Danah Boyd points out an import disconnect in the definitions of privacy: that of the public layman and that of the scholars and engineers tasked with determining the minutiae of the definition itself. Identifying this disconnect is critical in the discussion of privacy as it precludes meaningful discourse on how to implement privacy measures that satisfy all involved parties. While a more philosophical view is presented by the philosopher Helen Nissenbaum, the triviality of the statement, once again, fails to advance any kind of useful discourse on what privacy truly is; saying “privacy is always rooted in context” is a general statement that does nothing to establish a set of axioms from which we derive a general sense of what privacy is.

So then, what is privacy? Or rather, what are some common features of this ethereal concept we refer to as “privacy”? For this, we can return to Boyd’s distinction between two different views: that of the public and that of scholars and engineers. For the public, privacy is the ability to hide certain personal details from the public eye or scrutiny. Sounds simple enough, but this definition falls apart with regards to private third parties. Suppose, for example, that a teenager doesn’t want their parents to snoop about their private social media feeds, accounts that are understood to be privately available to a select group of people chosen by the teen themselves. Parents, in this situation, act as a private third party and, under the aforementioned definition of privacy, should be allowed to have access to these accounts. However, ask any teen whether or not they would grant access to their social media to their parents and you’ll be met with a zealous “No”.

So then, if this definition fails to address certain, we must turn to the scholarly definition, the one wherein the actor has control over the flow of their personal information. This definition, however, also has its faults, faults which have grown more apparent with the advancement of the digital age. We’ll examine these faults in the context of a teen’s media feed once more. Consider then, the case where a teen posts information to a select number of carefully curated followers: close friends and acquaintances, among others. Following, suppose one of those friends wishes to share the post with their friends, and so on and so forth. Here, we see that the scholarly definition of privacy fall apart at the outset, as as soon as the teen posts the information, they relinquished all control over the flow of that information.

As such, we see that both definitions of privacy fail in an increasingly connected world, but they do provide us with a general sense of what privacy means in practicality: privacy can be loosely defined the ultimate freedom to choose who exactly can view one’s personal details. While such perfect privacy may never be achievable, defining privacy as such can ultimately lead to constructive discourse on how to approach such an ideal, despite the increasingly abundant pitfalls created by a digitizing world.

“she has started creating a ‘light version’ of her life that she’ll regularly share on Facebook just so that her friends don’t pester her about what’s actually happening. Much to her frustration, she finds that sharing at least a little bit affords her more privacy than sharing nothing at all.” (Boyd 74).

In this social-media fueled age, it seems that the typical “cynic[al]” doctrine of privacy—”that only people who have something to hide need [it]” still rings true to a certain extent. I find that it is often the norm for people of my generation, which is relatively more internet conscious and well-lectured on the dangers of social media than our early 2000s counterparts, to practice certain measures of privacy from outsiders—like keeping Instagram or Facebook pages on the “private” setting so that only those who you allow can see your posts. However, I also find that it is often privacy from those we know in real life that is much harder to obtain in our online personas. In this quote a teenage girl finds that she must somewhat regularly post on Facebook to keep her friends from pestering her about why she isn’t updating people on her life online. This story is not an outlier, and it would definitely be a true statement that the norm is regular social media use, and not the other way around. If someone goes from posting regularly on any of their social media sites, to silence, it would definitely raise alarm from those in their online following and lead to invasive questioning in real life.

Therefore, these days, the idea that wanting privacy is indictive of  having something to hide, may have given way to the idea that choosing not to share (and share frequently) online is indicative of having something to hide.

“Rather than finding privacy by controlling access to content, many teens are instead controlling access to meaning.” (Boyd, 76)

Discussing this quote leads to some of the key differences between cryptography and steganography. While teens are openly publishing messages, only those with the requisite information and context required to decipher what the messages are saying will be able to take any meaning from them. It’s as if they’re sending encrypted messages where the encryption method is not based on mathematics or systematic rearrangement and swapping of letters, but is instead based on context and inside jokes. It’s like a “social cipher” with the key being a history of social interactions with the sender, rather than some series of letters or numbers.

Thinking about cryptic social media posts this way can lead to another thought about the difference between cryptography and steganography. In steganography, it is not the contents of a message that is being hidden, but the existence of the message itself. Cryptography, conversely, makes the message unintelligible to a receiver, unless that receiver has the key to decrypt the message, but the message itself is never hidden. In this way, posting something cryptic on social media can actually have characteristics of both. If a teen posts the lyrics to a song, the casual observer would just think that the teen likes that song, but that song may have some special meaning to someone else who takes away a completely different message. The message being delivered here was in plain view and was only correctly interpreted by its intended recipient, which is a characteristic of cryptography. However, the fact that there even was a message other than “I like this song” was unknown to everyone except its recipient, which is a characteristic of steganography.