Web Privacy: In Praise of Oversharing

Last summer, the author and media critic Jeff Jarvis was diagnosed with a treatable form of prostate cancer. In many ways, he responded to this news the way most cancer patients have since the advent of modern medicine: he told his relatives; he went back for further tests and second opinions; he read up on the treatment options, ultimately deciding on surgery to remove his prostate.

But he did something else along the way: he started blogging about his recovery. For years he had posted regular missives on the state of the media business on his popular blog, buzzmachine.com. But Jarvis began using his pulpit to discuss much more intimate topics. He blogged about his reaction to the diagnosis, about the challenges of opting for surgery over radiation therapy. After the surgery, he blogged about the humiliation of wearing adult diapers. He blogged about his erectile dysfunction, albeit using slightly less technical language. Buzzmachine went from being a blog about the sagging state of the newspaper business to being about the sagging state of — well, you can see where this is going.

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Jarvis is a friend of mine, but it may tell you something about the strange mediated state of 21st-century friendships that I first found out about his cancer diagnosis in a Twitter update that he sent out linking to his original blog post. This is how we live now: we get news that we’re facing a life-threatening disease, and the instinctive response is, I’d better tweet this up right away. We are constantly hearing about the Facebook generation’s penchant for oversharing online, but Jarvis is in in his 50s, and he’s not alone. The writer Howard Rheingold started a blog — called Howard’s Butt — to chronicle his battle with colon cancer. The 64-year-old British technology journalist Guy Kewney blogged through the final months of his life after a year-long battle with colorectal cancer.

The strangest thing about tweeting your cancer diagnosis is that it doesn’t even seem that strange anymore. We are overexposed to overexposure. But it’s worth remembering that the Internet was not always supposed to turn into a networked version of The Truman Show, where we’re all playing Truman. If you look back through the archives of early Internet enthusiasm — back in the day when you still had to explain what a “browser” was — one of the most striking things about that period is how obsessed it was with the technologies of privacy. The second issue of Wired feature an anonymous group of encryption experts on its cover. Entire books were written about the cutting-edge science of privacy keys that would allow you to transmit information that only a trusted recipient would be allowed to read. The premise was simple enough: these early tech visionaries recognized that our private lives were inevitably going to move online, which meant that we were going to have to develop electronic curtains to keep the neighbors and the Feds from peering in. Let’s say you got sick and had to communicate electronically with your doctor, they would say. You wouldn’t want the whole world to find out about your condition, would you? That’s why we need strong encryption tools.

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Encryption proved to be exceptionally useful for financial transactions and other official business online, but in the personal realm, that early privacy imperative now looks quaint, like the discreet bloomers of Victorian beachgoers. Some of us actually did want the whole world to find out about our condition. Life might be safer when private data stays private, but it also turns out to be less interesting.

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For Jarvis, the decision to blog about his condition was an easy one. “When I got the diagnosis, my immediate impulse was to go public,” he says. “Now, you can say that this is because I’m an exhibitionist, but there was value that I wanted back from this community.” Within days of his initial post, he had hundreds of comments on his blog, many of them simply wishing him well, but many offering specific advice from personal experience: what to expect in the immediate aftermath of the surgery, tips for dealing with the inconveniences of the recovery process. By taking this most intimate of experiences and making it radically public, Jarvis built an improvised support group around his blog: a space of solidarity, compassion, and shared expertise. And in conducting this conversation in public, Jarvis had another target audience in mind: Google. Because Buzzmachine enjoys a high ranking in Google’s index, Jarvis’s posts about his cancer were likely to be featured prominently in search results for prostate cancer-related queries. “Yes, you get support from friends by going public with something like this — that’s pretty obvious,” he says. “But you also get highly detailed information about what you’re about to go through, and you have the ability for all of us together to inspire other people to go get tested.”

In the end, it wasn’t just a conversation for Jarvis, it was a conversation for the thousands of other people who will come to those pages through Google. There is an intensity and honesty to these public disclosures that can be enormously helpful, next to the formal, anonymous advice of a hospital cancer site. When you read through Guy Kewney’s final posts, you hear a voice that you almost never encounter, the voice of someone who has made enough of a peace with death that he can look it squarely in the eyes, someone writing about the daily indignities of terminal disease alongside an honest accounting of the loss he feels dying at a too-early age, interrupted by strange flashes of happiness. You get a truer account of what it actually feels like to go through that terrible experience than any official page on the Mayo Clinic or WebMD sites could ever offer.

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Jarvis now talks about this experience as a lesson in the virtues of “publicness.” The Constitution may not contain an explicit reference to the right to privacy, but the notion that privacy is something worth cherishing and protecting needs little justification. What Jarvis suggests is that the opposite condition needs its defenders: that publicness, too, has its merits. Oversharing, in a strange way, turns out to be a civic good. This concept also dates back to the early days of the electronic commons; Rheingold’s 1993 book The Virtual Community told the story of a member of the pioneering online community, The Well, posting about an ultimately fatal battle with cancer. But The Well was a small community compared to the vast expanse of the Web, and those conversations unfolded in a space uncrawled by Google’s spiders. The shared experience and wisdom that comes from living in public can now reach a much bigger audience — most of them complete strangers, dropping into the conversation from a search query.

Of course, the cancer element endows a certain nobility to all the talk about Jarvis’s penis and Howard’s butt. There may be civic good in oversharing about your erections (or lack thereof) when you’re battling prostate cancer, but I think it is a reasonable assumption that 99% of all discussion of sexual activity on Facebook does not have such laudable intentions behind it. Every other day, it seems, an article runs somewhere documenting some lamentable case of a teen getting charged with distributing child pornography after posting nude pics of his girlfriend online. We may well need a new understanding of how the public life can serve a higher purpose. But we also need to know when to shut up already.

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It is tempting to look at these case studies and conclude that the whole concept of privacy is teetering on the edge of obsolescence. The encryption visionaries used to talk about the importance of keeping your purchase history private; now new startups like Swipely and Blippy let users automatically publish all of their purchases online. Instead of worrying about some ominous surveillance state tracking our movements, we now check-in at locations using the booming location-based social network, Foursquare, announcing to our friends (and strangers) the moment we arrive at the bar, with exact geographic coordinates attached.

Consider the way Facebook has steadily eroded its default privacy settings over the past five years. When the service first launched in 2005, its privacy policy created a virtual fortress around your personal data: “No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook,” its terms of service read, “will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.” In other words, in the original Facebook universe, anyone who was interested in getting to know you was effectively treated like a vampire: he had to be invited in first. Over the past five years, however, the fortress around your personal information has turned into a drive-through. Late last year, the company announced that a long list of personal details — everything from your profile photo, your friends and fan pages, your gender, your geographic region, and the networks you belong to — were “considered publicly available to everyone.”

Yet consumers have responded to that steady erosion of default privacy by flocking to Facebook in staggering numbers. Earlier this year, Facebook unseated Google as the most popular web site for U.S. visitors. The Facebook trend suggests that it’s not simply that we are indifferent to these privacy encroachments — instead, we’re actively embracing them. The trend has been dubbed Zuckerberg’s Law, after a oft-tweeted quote from the Facebook founder: “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”

But we shouldn’t be too quick to declare the death of privacy. In recent weeks a public backlash has been brewing against Facebook’s privacy transgressions, with a number of high-profile tech sector figures blogging about their frustration with the service, and more than a few announcing that they’ve deleted their accounts. When Google introduced its social network, Google Buzz, earlier this year, it was immediately pilloried for making its users e-mail contacts public by default. Google quickly changed the default configurations, but the controversy badly damaged the product’s launch.

Meanwhile, Facebook seems to have been rewarded for being more promiscuous with our personal information. But the service has also greatly expanded and refined the controls that it offers for regulating just what gets exposed to your extended network and beyond. There are now more than 30 distinct controls on Facebook that govern your public exposure. You can configure your account so that the entire world views your bio and your interests, but only immediate friends have access to your photos and religious views. There’s even an ex-girlfriend-blocker that lets you prevent a specific person from seeing certain information, even if you set it to be viewed by everyone. Ten years ago, the idea of a privacy dashboard in a software application was unheard of. Today, Facebook’s privacy controls look like something out of the cockpit of an Airbus 380.

“Fundamental, privacy is about having control over the flow of information,” the social network scholar, danah boyd, argued in a much-discussed speech this spring at Austin’s South by Southwest conference. “It’s about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting. When they feel as though control has been taken away from them or when they lack the control they need to do the right thing, they scream privacy foul.”

In the late 1990s, at the height of the dotcom boom, an Internet tycoon named Josh Harris launched an elaborate art project called Quiet: We Live In Public, where more than 100 willing participants lived in an underground bunker, every moment of their bacchanalian existence filmed by a vast array of webcams. When that experiment was cut short by law-enforcement officials, Harris embarked on an equally revealing experiment: living with his girlfriend in a SoHo loft under unceasing Web surveillance, each bowel movement and lover’s quarrel accompanied by live chat discussions among strangers all around the world. (The relationship fared about as well as the bunker did.) Last year, a documentary on Harris — called We Live In Public — won the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at Sundance. The film holds out Harris as a kind of holy fool, a demented visionary who managed to anticipate the new normal of constant public exposure. Yet watching the 10-year-old footage, you can’t help but notice how much of Harris’s vision failed to come true. It is far easier to set up web cameras and share video online today — thanks to YouTube and ubiquitous high-speed bandwidth — and yet almost no one chooses to display themselves in such an extreme way. What we do online is something quite different: we curate our private lives for public exposure. We don’t serve up a raw feed of our existence. We edit out certain bits, and highlight others. We fiddle with the privacy controls at Facebook. We define the circles of exposure.

There used to be a large crevasse separating the intimate space of private life and what’s exposed by the klieg lights of fame. But in the Facebook age, that crevasse has broadened out into a valley between the realms of privacy and celebrity, and we are starting to camp out there and get the lay of the land. What happens in the valley should not be mistaken for fame. When you sift through the birthday party pictures of a friend of a friend, you are not mistaking her for Lady Gaga. That isn’t her 15 minutes of fame. That is your private life colliding that of a person you could imagine being friends or colleagues with, but aren’t. Call it the valley of intimate strangers.

The fascinating and troublesome thing about the valley is that the rules of engagement there are not clearly defined, and it’s likely that they will stay undefined. Some of us talk about our relationships online; some allude to them indirectly; some keep them behind a cone of silence. Jarvis was so eager to blog about his cancer diagnosis that he felt almost restricted when he had to wait for his son to return from camp so he didn’t find out via a tweet that his dad was sick. But at the same time, Jarvis draws the line at talking about his personal finances. (“l’ll blog about my penis,” he says, “but somehow it makes me uncomfortable talking about how much money I make — I’m still too American, I guess.”) In our house, we have built a set of improvised rules about how much of family life to make public: I tweet or blog little anecdotes about the kids, but don’t mention them by name. We never post pictures of them, except to our inner circle of friends on Facebook. When they’re old enough for their own Facebook account, we’ll let them decide for themselves how public they want to be with their lives.

And that’s the point, really: these are decisions now. In the old days, life was set by default to be private unless you happened to be famous. Now, we have to choose whether we want to venture into the valley of intimate strangers, and how exactly we want to live there. That requires a kind of literacy, different from the “information literacy” that educators and media theorists have been talking about for decades. It requires a literacy in the virtues and perils of both privacy and publicness. It requires that we acknowledge that certain kinds of sharing can, in fact, advance a wider public good, as well as satisfy our own needs for compassion and counsel.

In our house, we have had health issues — fortunately not as debilitating as Jarvis’s or as tragic as Kewney’s — that we have chosen not to bring to the public sphere of the valley. We have kept them private not because we’re embarrassed by them, but because some things we already think about enough and would frankly rather think less about, and we don’t need to the extra prodding of 1,000 Facebook friends thinking alongside us. Every revelation sends ripples out into the world that collide and bounce back in unpredictable ways, and some human experiences are simply too intense to let loose in that environment. The support group isn’t worth the unexpected shrapnel. Most of us, I think, would put the intensities of sex and romantic love in that category: the intensity comes, in part, from the fact that the experience is shared only in the smallest of circles.

But no doubt something is lost in not bringing that part of our lives to the valley. Somewhere in the world there exists another couple that would benefit from reading a transcript of your lover’s quarrel last night, or from watching it live on the webcam. Even a simple what-I-had-for-breakfast tweet might just steer a nearby Twitterer to a good meal. We habitually think of oversharers as egoists and self-aggrandizers. But what Jarvis rightly points out is that there is something profoundly selfish in not sharing.

Zuckerberg’s Law is unlikely to hold true in the long run: we’ll run out of information to disclose if we keep doubling it every year. But there is no doubt that five years from now, when my children are teenagers, they will be comfortable living in public in ways that will astound and alarm their parents. I can already imagine how powerful the instinct to worry about predators and compromising photos will be. But it will be our responsibility to keep that instinct in check and to recognize that their increasingly public existence brings more promise than peril. We have to learn how to break with that most elemental of parental commandments: Don’t talk to strangers. It turns out that strangers have a lot to give us that’s worthwhile, and we to them.

Still, talking to strangers is different from handing over a set of your house keys. We’re learning how to draw the line between those extremes, and it’s a line that each of us will draw in different ways. That we get to make these decisions for ourselves is a step forward; the valley is a much richer and more connected place than the old divide between privacy and celebrity worship was. But it is going to take some time to learn how to live there.

This is an expanded version of an article that ran in the May 31, 2010 issue of TIME. Johnson’s seventh book, Where Good Ideas Come From, will be published in October

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