As we move around in online spaces, it can be difficult to keep track of how visible our actions and our conversations are to other people—and to the corporations that mine our data for profit. Because all of your online interactions happen through the same set of devices, it can be hard to keep track of when your communication is actually public.
But a new exhibition at the Tate Modern museum in London uses a simple metaphor to explain the sliding scale of privacy on different online platforms in a way everyone can understand: architecture.
By creating familiar physical spaces that correspond to the online platforms many of us know so well, the artists behind the exhibition hope to help people become more digitally literate. “When it comes to our online behavior, we have a hard time discerning how public something can be,” says Carmen Augilar y Wedge, a designer and co-founder of the studio Hyphen Labs, who created the exhibition with her co-founder Ece Tankal. “We have private conversations through very public channels and… we don’t know how that info is going to be used in the future.”
“Lots of digital spaces are designed in a binary way—it’s private or it’s not,” says Caroline Sinders, a machine learning researcher and artist who collaborated on the exhibition with Hyphen Labs. “But that’s not the way we live our lives. We have a variety of social interaction that can’t be fit into those two buckets.”
Even at this most private level, communication is still mediated by tech platforms. “Powerful systems gain power by embedding themselves in your everyday life,” Augilar y Wedge explains. “Technology has really encoded itself into all our types of relationships, which is why it’s become so powerful.”
Facebook, the giant of social networking, has decided that more private conversation—like you’d have in your living room, or one-on-one in your home—is the future of the company. Given the sheer number of scandals that the company has faced over data leaks and privacy violations, it’s a logical move that’s more in line with the direction that people are moving anyway. With the rise of misinformation and tech companies’ inability to effectively police harassment, the shiny veneer of many of the public and semi-public spaces on the internet has worn off.
Using these familiar architectural places as a metaphor helps highlight just how public most of our interactions are, even as we gravitated toward more private communication. Many of us spend large amounts of time in public and semi-public spaces in the real world—commuting, in the office, in a restaurant—perhaps just as much as we do in the privacy of our own homes. Comparatively, we spent very little time in that most private of places—the bathroom. Similarly, the vast amount of our time spent online is often public, even when it feels private. Browsing through websites on your computer, even if you don’t think you’re interacting with anyone, is an incredibly public act, with dozens of trackers reporting your every move to their corporate owners (unless you decide to use a private browser, like Tor).
Part of the challenge is that all of our online interactions, from the most public to the most private, can happen on the same device: a smartphone. But remembering which apps act like different types of architecture—from the public square to the living room—is a handy guide for keeping the spectrum of digital privacy straight.