Privacy as a Social Problem, Not a Technology Problem - CITP Blog

Bob Blakley argues that technologists frame privacy poorly by treating it as a technology problem when it is a social one, and the article's author agrees with this point while cautioning against overextending it. Blakley describes privacy as a social good people give one another, and he holds that technology should be designed to help social mechanisms work, such as making photo tagging reveal the photographer and tagger as well as the subject. The author warns that technology also creates new problems, citing James Grimmelmann's term "Accidental Privacy Spills," in which a private email was forwarded to thousands of people through many seemingly harmless decisions. The author concludes that good design is not the whole solution but can be started now without a sweeping societal agreement.