Long Road

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about privacy, the public domain, and Indigenous knowledge and cultural materials as I was writing an article about the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal project. Privacy, as it gets used in arguments for and against digital technologies that can easily reproduce images and or control/limit access to materials, is really a shorthand for “individual privacy”–that is, MY privacy as a citizen (usually also tacitly understood to be a US citizen, so with the baggage of linking individual privacy to equally value-laden terms like freedom and democracy). What rarely happens is an unpacking of the idea of privacy in the digital context as it relates to other notions of social responsibility (which really is what we are often talking about when we invoke the notion of “privacy”) between groups of people. In the US context, various groups including the First Archivists Circle and the Native American Archives Roundtable, Society of American Archivists have been thinking about this for some time and produced a set of “protocols” for dealing with Native American materials, in Australia there has been a similar movement and set of protocols. Outside of Indigenous groups linked to institutions, one exception in dealing with popular issues focused on privacy and digital materials is danah boyd’s work focusing on “teens”–although even here she is talking about US teens.  She recently wrote a blog post in which she argued that:

There’s an assumption that teens don’t care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy settings are a binary. What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways.

So, teens, according to boyd, have a different conception of privacy–at least when dealing with facebook. OK, great. Let’s think that through. Substitute “Indigenous people” for teens in that paragraph and what would we have? From my experience it would generate a stream of comments along the lines of “why should they get special treatment?” or “we can’t limit access for some people and not others,”….etc.

However, the American Library Association is taking this issue seriously asking how can we think about access and privacy in relation to “public” materials in a way that takes into account variable relationships to those materials? After a conference in 2008 concerning “traditional cultural expressions” (TCEs) and then a working group following the conference, the ALA drafted this paper. The paper suggests, among other things, that:

While libraries consider copyright review as a necessary requirement prior to digitization, libraries should also consider other issues that may be at stake including cultural sensitivity and traditions. Because preserving and providing access to TCEs is a significant and complex activity, libraries can provide support and expertise to those communities that choose to preserve their own cultural heritage. Libraries that preserve TCEs, in turn, should consult with traditional communities. Libraries may discover that in some instances providing secondary resources about the materials rather than providing direct access to the materials is the best course given the concerns of indigenous communities.

In this context, then, librarians would be asked to limit access in order to maintain the social relationships and cultural protocols Indigenous peoples have with the materials in their institution. Some might see this as a privacy concern, although I am reluctant to use the term as it is understood in the terms of the present debate surrounding digital materials because of its inherent link to individual privacy and a notion of public as its opposite: either private or public. In this case, the terms don’t fit, there is no binary opposition here. In most cases where Indigenous peoples are asking for access stipulations there is a continuum of access types based on social relations, place-based knowledge, or cultural protocols. Much like boyd’s “teens” and their varying conceptions and deployments of “privacy” and “publicity,” Indigenous claims offer us a way to think through the historical and political histories of exclusion that give us our default notions of privacy upon which much of the debates surrounding access and digital “controls” circle.

So when I saw that ALA was also asking me–as a US citizen–to “join the privacy revolution,” I was curious if they were taking an expansive view based on their own stand on TCEs or if there was a disconnect between that practice and the question of individual privacy rights in terms of individual information–that is, their “join the privacy revolution” campaign seems to be focused on individual information: what I search for, what I check out of a library etc., not so much on the collections themselves. For me its difficult to disambiguate these two concerns. It’s the very conception of individual privacy that we need to interrogate as it plays out in various situations pertaining to access to and the circulation of “information” (broadly conceived).

It appears that the good folks at UWM School of Information Studies and UWM Libraries are putting together an event to stimulate discussion about privacy and libraries in this context. Via Michael Zimmer’s blog post here are the questions they are focusing on:

• What innovative online tools and services are libraries bringing to users, and what are the potential impacts on patron privacy?
• Are there privacy considerations for providing or controlling access to digital collections?
• How do current laws & policies protect patron privacy, and are any changes coming?
• What are the broader ethical responsibilities for librarians and information professions in the libraries of the future?

In my comment I wrote:

Given the ALA’s recent public document “Librarianship and Traditional Cultural Expressions: Nurturing Understanding and Respect” (http://wo.ala.org/tce/) will the panel also be discussing the differences between conceptions of privacy cross-culturally? the legacies of Enlightenment notions of privacy on collecting institutions current policies? the effects of the emphasis on privacy (tacitly assumed to mean individual privacy) for group or communal concerns?

To which Michael responed:

Thanks for pointing this out, Kim. Clearly, different cultures have different conceptions of values & rights, including privacy. Unfortunately, that discussion is beyond the scope of this panel, and we’ll be focusing (largely) on the U.S. legal and conceptual environment.

But I’m working on similar projects focusing on the intercultural challenges of information ethics, especially in the African context. I’ll post more on that soon, but there’s some helpful information at the International Center for Information Ethics, as well as the African Information Ethics portal.

It seems to me that these issues are, in fact, not separate at all. Instead, they are intimately intertwined. First, the US exports its view of IP and privacy rights all over the world in the from of TRIPs and other “agreements.” Secondly, the “U.S. legal and conceptual environment” includes (but ignores) Native views, histories and politics, just ask Native librarians and curators who deal with these issues on a daily basis. The fact is, other conceptions of privacy get left out and marginalized because they challenge the core assumptions of privacy that are linked to ideologies of freedom and democracy that are unhinged in the indigenous context because of the very exclusion of these groups of people from these supposedly foundational elements of US collecting institutions.