I grew up semi-digital: my parents installed dialup when I was in elementary school; I started using AIM in middle school, and Facebook in high school; I got my first smartphone in college. I grew up comfortable around technology, but my roots are analog.
Today, however, children are surrounded by technology from Day 1. These kids are Born Digital, according to John Palfrey and Urs Gasser.
Palfrey and Gasser argue that a kid’s “digital dossier” — all her digital personally identifying information, publicly accessible or not, disclosed to third parties or not — is open before she’s even born. For instance, when her pregnant mother first gets a sonogram, the resulting files begin her digital dossier. Going forward, all new data elements, including medical files, school records, emails, social media accounts, and governmental surveillance contribute to her dossier. All this data may not be connected… but it still exists.
Over time, a child also forms a “digital identity,” using a subset of her dossier. She might contribute to this identity deliberately by posting selfies to Instagram. Family might also contribute to this identity by sharing YouTube videos that include her and her friends. Even strangers might contribute to this identity by sharing her name in a news article they’ve written. (A stranger’s ability to affect someone’s digital identity can get even more extreme, like in the case of Justine Sacco’s massive online shaming.)
Palfrey and Gasser explain how a digital identity is, in fact, a type of “social identity.” Social identities have always existed, but they used to be more malleable. For instance, if a couple moved to a new town, their kid could revamp her public persona by just dressing and acting differently. But in the digital age, social digital identities are more permanent. As they say, “once something’s on the Internet, it’s there forever.” (For a more humorous version of the same argument, check out Emma Rathbone’s New Yorker article “Before the Internet.”)
In fact, the European Union has explored the concept of “the right to be forgotten”/”the right to informational self-determination,” which would allow people to force data deletion from their digital dossiers if certain conditions were met. And California established an “Online Erasure” law in 2015, allowing minors to request the removal of information they previously posted on a website or app. In essence, we are grappling with how to counteract permanence of our digital dossiers and identities. Unfortunately, as Born Digital states, “the data collection practices of corporations and other types of organizations are changing at a rate that is faster than the rate of change for society’s methods of protecting that data.”
Now, the luddite in me wants to scream, “Let’s reign back technology! Let’s reclaim the analog world!” But it’s impossible. As Gasser writes,
We can’t simply ‘opt out’ from the use of digital technology anymore–at least not for good. The latest survey data indicates that people don’t simply trade off personal data against the convenience of digital media. Rather, people express a sense of resignation and feel like they no longer have a real choice in the matter. I think they are right. And that’s troublesome, because the ‘solution’ to the privacy problem can then no longer be at the level of the individual. […] We need solutions at the system’s level: changes in the incentive structure of companies, for instance, so that they do not collect all data by default, or just anything they wish, to use for whatever reasons they find to be remotely interesting commercially. We need restrictions on the information that governments are allowed to collect and analyze, and clear limits on the uses of such data.
But how will we get there? That’ll have to be a discussion (and a worry) for another day.
Header image by Adrien Coquet from Noun Project