by Alice E. Marwick
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2023, 384 PP. HARDCOVER, $32.50
ISBN: 978-0-300-22962-2
Alice E. Marwick’s timely and perceptive book, The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media, is a stimulating work. In it, Marwick, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tackles one of the most pressing issues of our time—privacy. The central argument that Marwick makes is that safeguarding privacy requires the formidable task of shifting the perspective of privacy protection from the individual sphere to the networked one. She makes three claims in her book that she further illuminates with rich, humancentric stories. The three claims—one, that privacy is networked; two, that privacy is unequally distributed; and three, that the first two concepts are interconnected—emanate from years of research documenting attitudes toward privacy among different groups. Her assertions are based on analyses of privacy attitudes from the lived experiences of marginalized groups, specifically, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Marwick affirms that people must acknowledge individual powerlessness against uncontrollable networks. Though The Private Is Political is not a legal analysis, Marwick argues that legal protections are inadequate to address this challenge.
Throughout the book, Marwick uses the term “network” to consider three levels of connections, all of them insecure. She describes these connections as explicit through social technologies or “behavioral networks mapped and traced through the consumer-level tracking and aggregation of big data,” along with “the deeply rooted and interconnected networks of surveillance from the state toward citizens vis-à-vis education, employment, social services and criminal justice” (3). She makes the important and compelling point that “networked privacy is enabled not only by social platforms and the actors behind them but by the very act of digitization” (3). This digitization, she argues, turns transitory information into something observable, perceptible, and measurable.
The networked privacy framework that Marwick proposes is a response to the saturated world of social media, state and corporate surveillance, and big data technologies. She also draws upon feminist approaches, particularly the US second-wave feminist idea that the personal is political (9), to highlight the feminist history of privacy. She grounds her book in feminist movements because, as she points out, feminists have long contended that matters once thought of as primarily “private,” such as intimate partner violence, should be pulled into public life. A fundamental truth of privacy is that it is better conceived as social, contextual, and fragile. She eschews the idea that the concept of privacy, formulated decades ago, is sufficient today and argues that a feminist framing is necessary. [End Page 208]
One particularly interesting aspect to Marwick’s book is her chapter on privacy work, that is, “the tasks, behaviors, and mental heuristics that people engage in to maintain personal privacy in the face of networked privacy violations” (63). Marwick compellingly reframes these privacy-protecting strategies as a form of labor. She draws upon the example of Kien, an Asian American in North Carolina who is sacrosanct about his offline and online privacy. She narrates how he intentionally failed to share his plans to move to North Carolina from the Northeast with his friends and set the privacy settings on his Facebook page so stringently that nobody except him could see anything but his picture and birthday. Marwick further illustrates the phenomenon by drawing on the story of a transgender woman who only shares privacy information with other trans individuals. Both individuals leverage privacy-enhancement technology to protect online privacy.
A considerable portion of the work focuses on the impact of surveillance and other privacy violations among the poor. Here, Marwick uses a simple but effective definition of surveillance as the “systematic collection of personal information to manage a population” that “typically focuses on people who are considered dangerous, meaning that some groups are deemed to ‘deserve’ privacy, while others are deemed not to” (14). Marwick shows that state structures of policy, criminal justice, employment, education, and public assistance place the poor under immense and disproportionate surveillance. She also points out that one of the ultimate maxims in privacy scholarship, the right to be left alone, is not extended by employers or the state to the poor. She illustrates this point with numerous examples. For instance, she describes how employers treat low-wage employees with suspicion. In another example, she highlights the “stop and frisk” program of New York City as another instance of surveillance overreach. Marwick notes that the structures of policing, digital surveillance, data aggregation, criminalization, and confinement violate the privacy of marginalized groups more than they do of nonmarginalized groups. Social media platforms further exacerbate this form of tracking and surveillance.
Subsequent chapters challenge readers to view privacy and privacy violations through the experiences of those who experience marginalization through gender and class. Marwick devotes one chapter to privacy attitudes among sexual minorities. For members of the LGBTQIA+ communities, privacy is especially networked because if information leaks, the consequences can be life-threatening. Some members are outed through social media, while others retain strategic visibility. Marwick uses the example of Carlos, a man living in North Carolina who is both gay and undocumented. He initially kept his sexuality private in online spaces and is strategic about the information he posts. Carlos has never shared his citizenship status with his social media networks, but he belongs to a separate WhatsApp group of undocumented people who share information about local raids with one another.
This example illustrates a key point in the text. Many say they consider privacy breaches a fait accompli, arguing that precautions are futile, but through interviews and observations, Marwick has documented a range of privacy attitudes of people to show that while people may say they do not care about privacy, their actions signal otherwise. Perhaps the clearest example may come from Robin, a forty-six-year-old lesbian who allowed her spouse to maintain the privacy settings on her Facebook page but later felt incensed when she learned that her mother-in-law had read the couple’s private text messages (231). This may be one of the most evocative examples proffered to highlight privacy as an ongoing desire and effort for those on social media. [End Page 209]
Anyone reading this work may be tempted to stay away from social media or, as Marwick describes, “opt out.” Marwick discourages this impulse; data are being collected constantly, and opting out may not prevent personal data from being collected now or in the future. The data-collection process reminds us of the times in which we live and re-affirms that an individual approach is insufficient to protect one’s privacy. Privacy is part of the collective life, and protecting privacy calls for a shared sense of responsibility that, many might argue, is overdue. [End Page 210]
—Sheila B. Lalwani, University of Texas at Austin