The aim of this article is to argue that privacy, rather than serving only as a countermeasure against surveillance, can also be seen as its 'partner-in-crime'. Normative statements made by governments and companies on privacy can be regarded as a tool of governance in service of informational capitalism. Initially defined as a fundamental freedom, privacy has become a precondition for a blossoming economy in the context of the information society. The notion of privacy, as a critique of information society, has been assimilated and reshaped by and in favour of informational capitalism, notably by being over-individualized through the self-determination principle. To develop this idea, this article builds on the results of a study on the loyalty programmes run by the four biggest retailers of Switzerland and on the Foucauldian concept of biopower. Indeed, sexual liberation and the development of scientific knowledge on sexuality, the democratization of privacy, and the emergence of scientific discourses about privacy are processes that show intriguing similarities. Like sexuality, privacy has become a 'power-knowledge' related to moral standards defining what privacy should be. It produces 'subjects of privacy' who are supposed to take care of it according to the official conception of privacy advocates and of the legislature. Finally, we suggest understanding the conception of privacy as a terrain of power struggle between the promoters of an informational capitalism based on surveillance of citizens and consumers, and those who would prefer to promote privacy as a common good leading society to more democracy and freedom.
Adults usually suspect teenagers not to care about their online privacy, although it has been shown that they manage privacy settings more frequently. Actually, adolescents develop a strategic management of privacy in order to translate it to social prestige. This article empirically shows how they rely on strong ties and get advantage on their online privacy in order to produce social and symbolic capital, namely, to show to peers that they grew out of childhood. It also shows that this production relies on a subtle balance between the public and private spheres. Indeed, they must conduct a representation of their private life on a public sphere in order to convince peers, who serve as an authority of legitimation, that they have an exclusive privacy.
For more than a decade, many retail companies have been collecting large volumes of data on a daily basis through loyalty card programmes. These programmes gather, at point-of-purchase, the identity of the consumer, date and time of the transaction, and the list of products purchased. With the help of data mining techniques, companies can use this data to get a better knowledge of their customer and to address them personally with targeted advertisement. This “mass customization”, which is at the core of the relationship marketing paradigm, has traditionally been viewed as a means of customizing services to meet the needs of an existing market. However, it appears also to be invested in actually customizing consumers to meet market needs. To investigate this aspect of relationship marketing, a study was conducted to examine the extent to which companies in Switzerland use data-mining technologies and strategies, their data collection and analysis practices, the privacy risks posed by such practices, and the modalities of power they create. As a result, and as it will be developed in this article, I finally theorized surveillance of consumption as being a much elaborated form of biopower, which strongly relies on the use of data mining to reveal patterns in consumption. This biopower is actually growing as data collected through loyalty programmes is now becoming a prime target for other purposes than pure marketing, such as helping the fight of health policies against obesity, or to control the consumer’s intake of food additive. These new kind of practices bring major ethical issues that are also discussed in this article.
Lorsqu’ils font référence aux usages adolescents des médias sociaux, les adultes considèrent encore très souvent qu’ils n’ont pas de considération pour leur vie privée. Pourtant, une littérature récente montre plutôt que les adolescents maîtrisent mieux que les adultes les outils censés protéger leur vie privée. Rebondissant sur ce constat et sur la base de deux enquêtes empiriques à entrées multiples, cet article suggère qu’ils ne s’inscrivent pas dans une logique irréversible de dévoilement de leur intimité, mais davantage dans une forme de gestion stratégique. Il montrera comment les liens forts tissés et entretenus entre pairs adolescents sur les sites de réseaux sociaux constituent des ressources dans la gestion de leur capital social, essentiellement sollicité pour produire du capital symbolique.
This article aims to widen the question of online social networks sites (SNS) ethics going beyond the questions of privacy and self-management of data, yet dominant in the public debates. The main theoretical framework developed in this paper, based both on recent contributions and classical sociology, is that SNS have to deal with the social dynamics of distinction and social classes like in any other spaces. From this perspective, focusing only on online privacy is too subjective and individualistic to provide a satisfying answer. Thus, we suggest that transparency should be considered as a social and collective fact rather than an individual characteristic. Boundaries between online and offline world are becoming increasingly porous and we argue, although acknowledging certain particular characteristics of SNS, that SNS ethics should be less about the specificities of online behaviors than on their articulation with the social world.
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