By Lotus Xuelian Chen @ MIIS DLINQ
On Oct 25th 2019, DLINQ at MIIS team and I went to visit the “Glass Room” exhibition on digital privacy in downtown San Francisco. This was a productive and interesting exhibition which stimulated my critical thinking on the different perspectives regarding digital privacy between the United States and China.
I, as a Chinese student studying in the US found out Americans value their privacy very much both in terms of private life and public life. Americans tend to separate their private life and professional life in the workplace .In terms of filming and photographing in public,candid photography and not asking for permission to take photos of people is prevalent and a norm in China, while in the U.S., asking for permission should be the first step. In China, sharing information and news is caring and digital privacy is something strangers care about. We are used to exposing our data online. We share everything on our social media like Weibo and Wechat, the Chinese version of Twitter and Facebook.
In China, Chinese individuals live in a world where surveillance cameras are everywhere. I told my DLINQ fellows that one of my Chinese friends invented a human- shaped robot with surveillance cameras. This equipment is designed to surveil your children and the elderly parents at home during weekdays while you and your spouse are at work. It went viral and gained huge popularity, thus he earned lots of money by selling these equipments. My fellows just could not believe this story and found it “ insane ” and remarked that ”It is ridiculous”.They asked,“ Where is the trust among parents, children and elderly grandparents?”“ What if the company gains your family's data in your house,what do you trade off for this kind of convenience technology brings? ”
In my opinion,as a communal society, China’s traditional social norms,governance and education does not emphasize privacy,networking and relations with people along with data sharing in our daily lives play an important role in how the whole society functions. Therefore,as the development of the Internet and popularization of smart phones in both rural and urban China, this tendency to ignore privacy extends to the digital world. We use various social media and apps, we share our data without being aware about how our privacy is impacted. At the “Glass Room” exhibition, my colleagues teased me because of my lack of awareness related to digital privacy.
There were a few exhibits that were particularly interesting for me:
*Big Mother
There is a small piece of exhibition called “Big Mother”, It reflects on how we balance between using technologies to increase care, security, protection for human well-being and avoiding normalization of surveillance at a macro and micro level. As you can see below.
In addition, I found an app called Ovia’s Fertility and Pregnancy fascinating. The app receives personalized advice and information by inputting daily data about users’ moods, symptoms, weight and more. These kind of personalized data and advice is valuable for individual women who are pregnant or trying to conceive. More than 10 million women worldwide use the app.
The moment I wanted to suggest my friend who is pregnant to use this app, the DLINQ director stopped me. He laughed and said that the Washington Post revealed in April 2019 that a version of the Ovia app enabled employers to access their worker’s intimate personal data-including info about their sexual activity, miscarriages, and more. This kind of women’s health app faces scrutiny over leaked or easily accessible private data. Be cautious!
But I’d like to say, we cannot stop using those fantastic and beneficial advanced technology even if we have to trade off some of our data. However, we have to build some ethical guidelines, regulations and laws to protect digital privacy.
Besides the "Big Mother",the exhibition touches quite a few amazing and inspiring topics.These photos below may give you an idea of them. How do you feel seeing the photos of the exhibit?
* Blacklists of restricted websites
Everyone is afraid of what they might be missing on the internet, but few of us know what is missing from the internet. Blacklists is an encyclopedia of restricted 2 million websites, in 13 volumes of 666 pages each.
*What do we lack information of? Such as celebrities using offshore tax havens.
*What does a data day look like?
At this moment when I am writing this article, I find that Google Photos automatically store some old photos of my hometown, Wuhan, which I could not remember when and where I updated them to Google Photos. This is a perfect example on how big companies in the digital data industry invade our personal data without informing us.
To wrap up, this “Glass Room” exhibition inspires me to reflect on differences on digital privacy between the United States and China ,to realize the urgency for me and my Chinese fellows to increase the awareness and significance of protecting our digital privacy.
From my personal perspective,I have made mistakes in terms of using social media —Such as I complained about my hometown city Wuhan in China is not charming which made me lose a job opportunity in Wuhan when my potential employer saw it. After all of the lessons and knowledge on digital privacy I have learned, I still use some social media like Wechat which I communicate and connect with my friends and family in China, like Facebook and Instagram to interact with my friends in the US, India and Vietnam. In order to protect my privacy, I decrease the times I update my moments on social media. I self-censor the content I post by asking myself: Does it expose my important personal information? Might it offend or harm others? Does it cause potential danger and risk to me and my acquaintances?
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