Our relationship to privacy is inseparable from our idea of trust. If you trust someone, you may be more willing to divulge personal information to them. If you are highly protective of your privacy, you may seem to others to be distrustful.
This is a normal social dynamic. But it is being cynically manipulated by the “sharing” or “trust” economy — where we trade homes, cars or belongings through third-party administrators such as Airbnb — in ways that threaten our privacy.
The chief executive of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, has said that “we don’t think you can be trusted in a place where you’re anonymous.” In order to participate in services like his, Mr. Chesky argues, you need to expose yourself. It’s a model of consumerism that depends on customers’ transparency
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It’s also a model of consumerism that makes our traditional idea of trust irrelevant. To trust someone is to assume that you can rely on them — that they do not need to be monitored or policed. But the infrastructure of the sharing or trust economy is largely a series of technical advances that enable us to track people constantly, removing any need to trust them.
I’ve seen this strange use of “trust” elsewhere in the world of dog walking. A British-based company called Tailster describes its walkers as “trusted” precisely because they are able to offer digital evidence that the walk has taken place.
Consider how the rise of the “nanny cam” is changing our idea of what constitutes a trustworthy babysitter. Once parents get used to reviewing the daily activities of their child-care providers, can they ever go back? Does the unrecorded nanny start to take on a somewhat sinister air? “Oh yes, the children will be safe with me,” she promises, wishing you a good day at work and slowly closing the door behind you.
These commercial endeavors are changing our attitudes toward private moments and private spaces. We’re encouraged to view privacy not as a desirable haven from the relentless exposure of public life, but as a zone of peril, an opportunity for untrustworthy behavior.
Likewise, the role of the chaperone has long been a way of making privacy respectable and, in a sense, not private at all. In the codified society of Edith Wharton’s New York, for example, unchaperoned meetings between the sexes were fraught with danger. Lily Bart, in Wharton’s 1905 novel “The House of Mirth,” fears social ruin when she is tricked into visiting a man alone, believing his wife to be sick in a room upstairs. When chaperones are the accepted convention, their absence inspires suspicion.
The digital surveillance technologies of today’s trust economy are our new chaperones. Their demure presence, like that of the maiden aunt in the corner of the drawing room, are, paradoxically, vivid markers of distrust.
Much of today’s privacy debate assumes that precious parts of our lives are under threat from intrusive corporations and governments. And this is so. But at an even more fundamental level, the design of our digital economy is steadily eroding the temperamental qualities that we need in order to treasure privacy at all: our tolerance for opaqueness, uncertainty and disconnectedness — and our faith in the decency of others.
Laurence Scott is the author, most recently, of “Picnic Comma Lightning: The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century.”
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