The Covid-19 lockdowns compelled many people to rely on digital technologies for everyday tasks and interactions, perhaps most dramatically while carrying out their work at home. With such a transformative moment of digital communication, multiple privacy concerns ensue, also beyond the legal framework of data protection. Suddenly people faced the unannounced challenge of managing a mix of routinized public-private divides in front of their computer screens in their (lack of) home offices.
Comparing lockdown experiences and early modern sources, this session explores how people respond, manage, fail, and learn to protect their privacy in conversations in past and present. We explore how, in the past and the present, the home becomes a space for negotiating public-private divides, and how people defend their privacy in various challenging contexts of communication.
We will show how experiences of protecting privacy in everyday practices and social interactions can inform approaches to privacy policies and settings in digital contexts.
The presentation draws on historical sources as well as ethnographic material collected during the first Danish lockdown in 2020. The presentation focuses on
a. physical environments where public-private divides are negotiated,
b. moments of uncertainty when everyday experiences and expectations for privacy are reconfigured
c. subsequent learning processes when people struggled to find their ways of protecting their privacy.
We argue that considering the private sphere as continuously enacted brings attention to subtle and informal norms and needs of privacy in (digital) conversations. Our cases indicate that protection of privacy is formed not only by laws, policies, and data settings, but also by various norms and needs, partly depending on personal affection.
In this light, we suggest that an understanding of the lockdown as a pivotal historical moment when everyday interactions subtly reconfigured the private sphere calls for an examination of the role of digital technologies as a site for the development of social practices, including practices that enact privacy.
Finally, we suggest thinking critically about what counts as information practice in digital settings as a way to guide ongoing debates on how future systems enable multiple dimensions of privacy.
Speakers:
Katja Pape de Neergaard, PhD fellow in Science and Technology Studies, the IT University, Copenhagen and the project STAY HOME: The Home during the corona crisis – and after (The Carlsberg Foundation), knee@itu.dk
Dr Johannes Ljungberg, Postdoctoral researcher in History at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen, jbl@teol.ku.dk
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