Privacy, in the End, Is About Keeping the Individual Safe in a Noisy Society | Is This Society Too Good to Young People? Part 5
QDaily interviewed 20 people, most of them from academia, media and publishing. What they share is a long habit of paying attention to public affairs, and the hope of passing on a "good society." The question we put to them: as the younger generation becomes more and more the mainstream of society, is that the future world we want?
QDaily interviewed 20 people, most of them from academia, media and publishing. What they share is a long habit of paying attention to public affairs, and the hope of passing on a "good society." The question we put to them: as the younger generation becomes more and more the mainstream of society, is that the future world we want?
Ten years ago, Leung Man-tao already saw trouble coming: people are so willing to put photos of their children online, and those photos will very likely stay online forever. The child is two or three months old now — do the bare-bottomed baby pictures have to follow him for the rest of his life?
On January 8, a young man surnamed Zhang flew a drone over an explosion in Hengshui, Hebei — more precisely, he filmed the rescue work on the morning after it happened — and the Hengshui police gave him five days of administrative detention for "disrupting the normal order of the rescue." Critics called it the state obstructing public oversight. Supporters argued that if unsuitable photos got out, that would violate people's privacy — and quite a few people take this view, some of them filling in the worst case themselves: what if "bad people" used the pictures?
Xu Zhiyuan has noticed that more and more informing of the "Chaoyang masses" kind — the Beijing residents famous for tipping off the police about their neighbors — grows out of the old gossip and watchfulness of the hutong. It just happens online now.
All of these questions come down to "privacy." Personal privacy: how we keep ourselves from being violated, now and in the future. Public privacy: how, and how far, citizens can exercise oversight. Other people's privacy: whether an individual is acting as a watchdog, or deciding how to treat someone else's conversation and conduct, and how to tell a public setting from a private one...
Privacy has always been inseparable from the making of a middle-class society. In Schnitzler's Century — a book that sets out to answer how the middle class formed — Peter Gay writes that "before the Enlightenment, living under the gaze of others was taken to be the natural human condition. In the countryside and in the towns alike, most people knew one another. In the Plymouth Colony, a family lived in a small house with no partition, or at most one divided into two rooms, so parents and children lived mixed together. In a two-room house, one room could serve as the bedroom where the parents had sex. Better-off Puritans might own a curtained bed, which gave them at least some space of their own." "Since most people were illiterate, both writing and reading a letter required the help of a literate neighbor, so correspondence was practically a public document. Reporting immoral conduct to the authorities — illicit sex above all — was treated almost as a civic duty."
And as middle-class society took shape, it was bound up with technology's steady trespass on privacy. "The rapid spread of the camera at the end of the 19th century produced a whole generation of amateur paparazzi ('Kodakers') and set off the first great debate over the death of privacy." Evgeny Morozov cites this in To Save Everything, Click Here as a story the tech pundits like to tell. Over time the public learns to live with each new device, and the worry recedes into the background. Then a new round of worry arrives, with the next technological revolution or advance.
The complication we face is that China is still in the middle of forming a middle class; this society has not finished its transition to "modern civilization." Illiteracy, at least in the cities, has fallen low enough to ignore, but to Xu Zhiyuan, talking about public and private space in China is still a luxury, because individual rights have not been fully recognized or protected. "There's no matching social norm to protect you. Chinese people have no concept of this. So every kind of overstepping and misplacement is completely ordinary. You live in a hutong, a guest comes to your home, a woman, and every auntie in the alley knows about it. What is that, at bottom? At bottom it's that they don't take your private space seriously. He doesn't think it's anything, and the police don't think they should protect your privacy either."
And just at this moment, technology has "handed everybody new means." "Now there's simply the internet. The auntie posts you online, and everyone can be that auntie. Nothing has changed at bottom."
Under an article QDaily ran last week, Why Do So Many People Feel No Shame Once They're Online?, a reader commented that "shame only comes when people you know find out about your private life" — and that is in fact a new problem. In a society that has not been thoroughly made middle-class, the internet has changed what "people you know" and "strangers" mean. A "modern civil society" still in the making has grown more complicated.
In the old world Peter Gay describes, "within a community, one person's business was everyone's business, something every member had a right to know." Modernization, civilization, or what we might call a "good world," means changing that old world. Jane Jacobs said that "privacy in the midst of the crowd" is the mark of city life.
How should we understand privacy — our own, other people's, and that of so-called public figures — and how should we understand public space? On this question, which bears on our own safety, what can we do ourselves? This is the fifth piece in the series "Is This Society Too Good to Young People?" In the end, our purpose is to push this society toward the good.
49. When did privacy appear as a legal right? Why isn't it just a trivial little secret?
Tong Zongjin
Associate Professor of Law, China University of Political Science and Law
This is of course a large theoretical question. There was a French philosopher named Benjamin Constant who wrote an essay called The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns. He said that in antiquity — in Athens, in Greece and Rome — there was basically no line between public and private. The state could look into and police your private space. On the other side, you as an individual could take part directly in affairs of state. From modern times on, the two gradually separated: the individual stays out of affairs of state, and the state stays out of your private life. In political terms, what we call civil society appeared. In legal terms, new kinds of rights appeared, the right to privacy among them — leave me alone, state; I have my own space, this is my own business. Look at the United States: there is a classic essay called "The Right to Privacy," written in the 1890s. By the 1960s the right to privacy was formally recognized as a fundamental constitutional right. Everything since, our whole legal system, works to protect it, including some of the provisions in our own country's law.
But under new technological conditions, our personal space, our private space, meets more and more interference from outside, the state included. Look at the revisions to the Criminal Procedure Law: we now have certain technologies, among them technical means of investigation. Take your phone — the state may be able to learn your private business through your communication device alone. It is extremely convenient, (resting on) a single technical means.
On the other side, the media and other people can get into our private space through all sorts of technical channels, including actual devices. None of this means that Constant's long arc from the ancients to the moderns has reversed. More likely it means that under these new technological conditions it grows harder and harder for an individual to hold on to private space. As for the line between public and private, certain things have come along, and technology has made that boundary less secure. There ought to be limits, and limits that hold. (The question is) whether our law can keep up — that too is a test of our legal system. Take something said at the dinner table: someone records it, photographs it, posts it online, and it becomes a public event. So whether our law can keep pace is the real challenge to the law itself.
50. Why is it wrong to make chat logs public on the internet?
Jiang Fangzhou
Writer, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of New Weekly
I find it genuinely hard to take when people, in the middle of a public blow-up, post chat logs or screenshots of conversations. And China has never had a tradition of insisting on the line between public and private space, or between morality and law. You can even see it running through history: in struggles for power, this has been used as a weapon again and again. The government has found it especially handy too, above all when it announces that an official has been disciplined over his private life. If state power itself treats this as such a useful weapon, how can it ask ordinary people to keep their own conduct clean?
It can't. At the very least, state power has done nothing to restrain its own trespasses into private life. If it has had any effect, it is probably a worse one. But this boundary should be put up. It is an important standard of a civilized society.
51. Why do people say different things on the record than they do in private? Is that hypocrisy?
Liu Bo
Opinion and Public Policy Editor, FT Chinese
One important feature of modern society is that it separates private space from public space. There is a great deal of theory about this. Habermas argued that public space is the precondition for democratic politics: an independent space above society and below government, in which citizens can freely discuss common affairs. The existence of public space secures both democratic politics and private freedom.
What was it like in antiquity? Everything was public. If an official's parent died and he failed to go home and observe the three years of mourning, that was not a private matter but a public one, and everyone would move to impeach him. But everything was also private: offices could be bought and sold, decisions of state could be made in secret. This blurring of public and private led to the oppression of the individual, and it also bred political darkness and corruption. Modern society separated the two to solve that problem. Say I am an official: my appointments must not serve my private interests, they must start from the public interest — but by the same token you cannot hold some minor point of private morality hostage against me.
Take me as a reporter doing an interview: if you turn on the recorder I'll tell you one thing, and if you don't I'll tell you another. That isn't hypocrisy, one face to your front and another to your back; it is a habit of modern society. And there are limits between public and private space as well. Some people try to enlarge private space — the Wang Baoqiang affair, for instance, a matter of private morality: there was an affair, no law was broken, and yet people demanded this and that, piled on excessive moral condemnation, made threatening statements and gestures. That is using private space to crowd public space. Public space has rules of its own.
Writing is the same. What I say day to day is not what I write. If I talked about political correctness or public space over dinner with friends, everyone would think I'd lost my mind. I'm not being a hypocrite. We are conscious of following the rules of public space, rules we worked out together and agreed together to keep. That is how we can define what privacy is and what can be discussed — there are lines we don't cross. We have to build that awareness in ourselves, the same way you use the crosswalk out on the street even though you can walk any way you like at home. If you speak in public, you have to think about how your listeners will feel.
52. How do we draw the boundaries? Should we draw them at all?
Liu Qing
Professor of Political Science, East China Normal University
The rule of law means, for instance, that nobody may come through your front door, which has to do with your property rights. Your right to privacy has likewise become a legal concept: I cannot take a photo of you and put it online without your consent. This line between the public and private spheres matters enormously to modern society and modern politics. But the line is not fixed or frozen either. That is what makes it such a difficult thing — and in the age of social media, the blurring and the elasticity of the public-private line are more troublesome still.
Li Yinhe
Former Researcher, Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
The question now is how to handle it. Clinton did not lose the presidency for taking up with Lewinsky. As for private opinions and private morality — say a man likes to swear: does that mean he can't host a show? He swears in his own private setting, and you still have to keep the distinction clear. You have to separate his private morality from his public performance, from his ability to host a show or to be president. Lumping them together strikes me as very strange.
53. Why does someone who doesn't protect his own privacy fail to respect anyone else's?
Tong Zongjin
Associate Professor of Law, China University of Political Science and Law
People also expose their private space on purpose; they want to show themselves. Posting in Moments, showing off the kids — that is private space, but you also want to share some of what you feel with your friends, because human beings are social animals. Which things are you willing to show, and how far are you willing to go? Where the boundary falls becomes even harder to fix by any settled standard.
Leung Man-tao
Writer and media figure
I wrote about this ten years ago: the drift of the internet is that we care less and less about the difference between the public and private realms, to the point of not caring at all.
Think about it. When many parents today have a baby, what do they do? They put photos of the child online to share with friends, and sometimes set them so the whole of Weibo can see. When they do it, they probably never ask whether this two- or three-month-old, once grown, will want his bare-bottomed baby pictures following him all his life. Most of us don't think about it. And with a medium like WeChat, when you use it, it isn't easy to tell — just as Westerners can't easily tell with Facebook — whether a thing is public or private. This pattern was already visible ten years ago, with blogs. Taiwan first translated "blog" as "online diary," which I think captures what it is: traditionally a diary is a tool, a record a person keeps for himself. Old diaries came with a key, because you were afraid someone would read them; a diary was a deeply private thing. But once you put the diary online, the whole thing turns over. You used to feel a diary was private and shouldn't be shown to anyone; now you feel a diary is meant to be shown, and you want a lot of people to see it, so you start keeping count of who read it and who reposted it. If nobody looks, you feel something is wrong, that it isn't right. So we have begun to care less and less about privacy — our idea of it, or the degree to which we respect it, is falling. And so we expose our privacy on a huge scale.
When we don't care about our own privacy, we won't care about anyone else's. That is why it is so easy now to take a picture of someone without asking. A couple of days ago, in an airport lounge, I ran into a man. He looked at me, sat down across from me, and pointed his camera at me for a long time without a word. To him, I think, this wasn't even a question; it never occurred to him that it was a violation. To see it as a violation you first need an idea of privacy, and he no longer has one, so he doesn't see a problem. He'd say, what I photograph today and who I show it to is my own freedom. Without that idea, you get exactly what you described earlier: things from WeChat Moments screenshotted onto Weibo, things said around the dinner table recorded and sent out. At that meal he wouldn't think to ask, may I record you while you talk? May I take a photo? He simply feels that taking the picture is his right, recording is his right, and sending it to whomever he likes is his freedom of speech, and none of your business.
Zhu Huiling
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Capital Normal University
There's something else too: the public and private realms really are mixing more and more. Say I'm in a bad mood today and post about it in Moments. That is a private thing, but once you choose to put it online it becomes part of the public. Someone may end up violating your privacy, but when you post it you also have to answer for yourself first.
54. What is the worst outcome? Do we have to define morality all over again?
Leung Man-tao
Writer and media figure
Our idea of the public and private realms has begun to blur, and once it does, my prediction is that the greatest shock of the next ten years will be that the moral order of humankind has to be rebuilt. Much of the moral order we have today rests on the division between public and private, on the separation between your private life and public society. If that is shaken, our future moral order is shaken with it.
Here is a simple example. In an American presidential election, or when European countries choose a prime minister, what a candidate usually fears most is someone turning up a scandal: that he once harassed a woman, that he did all sorts of bad things when he was young — so the candidate is a bad man, untrustworthy, not someone we should vote for. In the future that won't be a problem. Nobody will mind how much you did when you were young, because your mother put your bare-bottomed baby photos online when you were small, you talked with your classmates on WeChat all through kindergarten and primary school, everything went up, and your whole life, for people on the mainland, is transparent. In the future, when a presidential candidate runs, plenty of us may use the handy tools of the internet to find that in third grade his teacher caught him cheating, or that in middle school he faked a sick day and was really skipping class. Today we'd say the man is completely untrustworthy, he's been lying since he was a child, how can someone like that run for president? We'd have that doubt and that worry. In the future we won't, because everyone has done the same. It's a bit like Trump now: he was recorded saying things about that woman, grab her, sleep with her, and his answer was, so I said it, what of it? Haven't you? Right — we've all said such things and been recorded, so we no longer think it's a problem. When our company hires someone we check his record, and I find that when he was small plenty of people in his Moments feed were cursing him out; everyone turns out to have a long charge sheet. We are all ordinary people, everyone makes mistakes, and everything everyone has ever done is on the record, even on the public record. In the end, whether a man is looking for a job or running for office, we will gradually come to accept every problem he has had in the past. That is a great rebuilding of the public order, and our moral ideas will shift enormously: we will mind fewer and fewer things, and we will grow more and more tolerant.
55. Even with a public figure, we still have to weigh whether the matter touches the public interest. Why do we need to tell the false public events apart?
Zhu Huiling
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Capital Normal University
There's another issue here, which is what happens in the age of self-media. In traditional media the line between the broadcaster and the audience was very clear: the outlet published or supplied information and the reader took it from there. In the age of self-media, I am a broadcaster and an audience at the same time. On my way to work, if I see a fire or a car crash, I can put it on Weibo or in Moments, and I've become a broadcaster myself.
So I think media ethics in the age of self-media is a very good field to study.
Su Qi
Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Caijing magazine
Public events get worked up far too hard by self-media now; the moment anything happens they have to turn it into a public event. Otherwise it's just a circle feeding on itself. Take the Luo Yixiao affair — I said a few days ago that these self-media accounts ought to put up a gratitude leaderboard, because without events like this, (how would they live?) I keep wondering how to define a public event. There used to be a standard for it; now it seems anything with enough noise around it becomes one.
The old standard was certainly not that a lot of discussion makes something a public event. I'd say a public event has two features. First, it is public in nature, meaning it is genuinely relevant to people at large. Second, discussing it can change something about how the real world runs, or about the rules of society. But take the argument over the Wang Baoqiang affair: it has very little to do with the rest of us. It is a private matter. With self-media working it this way, the line between gossip and a public event is gone, and the accounts swing at you from every angle. There really isn't that much to say about it.
As for where we are now: decentralization. Sometimes everybody just wants to speak. But sometimes self-media deliberately drives things to the extremes; there may not be that much polarizing material in a topic, and they polarize it on purpose. Take the Luo Yixiao affair. Using it to piggyback on marketing was wrong, but there was no need to swing the other way either. At first everyone loved this so-called positive energy — maybe because we can't change reality, so it feels like no trouble at all to let our overflowing sympathy out, and there's nothing much wrong with that. But once people found it had been used for marketing, the backlash was excessive too. Through all of it, the way self-media fanned the flames strikes me as fairly absurd. And calling it a question of charity or of legislation doesn't rise to that level at all; it's making a mountain out of a molehill. The most important question now, I think, is how to keep small things from being blown up into false public events.
False public events drain away people's engagement with public questions that actually matter. They create two bad patterns. The first is that public issues lose their focus, so people can no longer tell which topics are meaningful public issues. If you suddenly make something like the Wang Baoqiang affair a public topic, what kind of public topic is that? It's a family matter.
In the end, I think the big waves wash out the sand. Self-media doesn't need this much froth. Once people are tired enough of the beauty, tired enough of the ugliness, tired enough of the froth, they stop looking, you can't keep it going, and it disappears on its own. Then maybe things swing back the other way? Or maybe, in the end, a few genuinely serious self-media accounts or official accounts, or the more traditional, established outlets, offer some guidance?
Gossip taking up public space is perfectly normal. The division of labor used to be clear: gossip, the tabloids, that kind of media covered it, and people read it for fun. Now, when I see so many serious outlets joining in the noise, I honestly don't understand it.
It's that serious discussion has become impossible — authoritarian pressure on one side, the (drive) of capital on the other, a double bind. In the end all public discussion turns into marketing. Since the start of the year it has been one marketing event after another, like the whole argument over "Phoenix Man" and "Phoenix Woman" over New Year.
56. In the same way, the paparazzi business is not a dignified one — so why do some people still think it makes sense?
Liu Qing
Professor of Political Science, East China Normal University
I am against the paparazzi, that is very clear. But the paparazzi today are not a simple case of violating the right to privacy.
The trouble, as we know, is that a great many actors talk about their private affairs on all sorts of occasions. When we follow a star we are not only following the work, the films he's made; we want to know who he is. Where was he trained? What is his family like? How many children does he have? Who has he dated?
His personal life becomes part of his acting career. Why? Because it gives people the feeling that they know this man, that the actor and I are something like friends, that we know him. So they'll help his box office along. Turning his private story into part of his publicity draws more ticket sales, and that strategy has already broken the relationship between public and private.
For an actor, ideally, who cares who you are — if you act well, that's enough. There's an American actor named Tommy Lee Jones, a very good actor who has made many films. He never gives interviews. He says, take me as an actor; judge me by my work; never mind who I am. It's like what Qian Zhongshu said: if you like the egg, why ask about the hen that laid it? But now we insist on looking at the hen, and at how she markets the eggs she lays.
All right. Since your marketing company, your agent, your media company have already done this, why can't the paparazzi do it too? Or put it another way: once the private life you pass along to us becomes part of your box-office draw, it is a public act, and then I want to know whether the private life you're passing along is real. You've used it to your advantage, so I want to know whether the information I'm getting can be trusted. In that sense the paparazzi have a legitimate reason to exist. They perform the function of a consumer protection association. If you use a man's private life as a sales device in the consumer market, then I get to look at whether the private life you've put on show is genuine or a fraud.
This seems to me different from the traditional right to privacy. Under the traditional right to privacy, if I am a private person with no effect on the public at all, then digging into my private life is of course a violation. But if I turn my personal story into a marketing story and it isn't true, then I am committing fraud. So this is where it gets very difficult.
57. Defining the public realm and the public interest is important work — so who does it?
Zhang Tiezhi
Writer and media figure
To rebuild the public realm in this era, the precondition is that you must respect private space more. Not everything about you and me can be made public. The public realm is quite clear: it must involve a matter of public interest, and that is what belongs in the public realm. In Taiwan it isn't only private conversations that get dragged out; over the past few years we have watched the media turn into gossip sheets, fixed on the private romances of celebrities. That alone I find tedious, and it has nothing to do with the public interest. I don't think the media should pay any attention to things with no bearing on the public interest.
So, back to today's subject: who is watching the public realm? Clearly the media on one side, and the great mass of internet users on the other. Because the media has enormous resources, it should take the lead in attending to the public questions that really matter. Perhaps that can be our conclusion for today: when internet users are working up some private matter, it doesn't actually touch the public interest, and what matters, I think, is for the media to take the lead in putting the public questions it ought to cover back on its own agenda. That is also the only way to rebuild the media's credibility.
(More reporting to come, updated as it appears.)
People in this report:
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.