Many Faces of Privacy: The Role of Perceived Privacy in Digital Autocracy

• In Event: Accepting Big Brother: Privacy & State Surveillance in China's Digital Sphere

Abstract

Digital revolution is changing the nature of privacy and reshaping its meaning across political regimes. While privacy is typically regarded as a core value of modern liberal democracies and as such, an integral part of fundamental rights of democratic citizenry, its role in an autocratic political system undergirded by digital political control remains less clear. What privacy is ought to be (nominally), as propagated by the autocratic governments, might be very different from how people perceive what privacy means for them. This begs a set of important empirical questions concerning the various meanings of privacy as perceived by people living in a digital autocracy, and the role of the different privacy attitudes they hold: are they subject to the context of digital control regimes (as outcome), or do they instead shape the effect of digital control on people’s attitudes towards digital autocracy (as moderator)?

To address these questions, we first outline the variegated privacy attitudes as widely perceived among the public in an autocratic political setting. Using qualitative data collected from fieldwork in China and literature review, we highlight four types of privacy attitudes prominently manifest among the autocratic public in a digital era: belief in the privacy-security trade-off (“trade-offisim”); belief that there is no privacy and nothing can be done (“fatalism”); belief that one has nothing to hide (“nothing-to-hide”); and belief in the importance of privacy (“protectionism”). We build our argument by integrating Helen Nissenbaum’s (2009) concept of “contextual integrity”: the contextual elements such as the social norms and the expectations in which the idea of privacy is embedded, matter. We show that the very concept of privacy bears very different meanings or manifestations not only between different political systems, but also among individuals living within the same political context.

To examine the role of different privacy attitudes, we employ a two-step design based on a survey experiment in China (N=4507). We first test the treatment effect of digital control (conceived as a variety of digital surveillance and censorship regimes) on privacy attitudes, emotional reactions, and political attitudes. Given insignificant effects on privacy attitudes, but significant effects on emotions and political attitudes, we then move to investigate the extent to which different privacy attitudes shape the effect of digital control on emotions and political attitudes respectively. Our analysis reveals a number of interesting findings: unlike emotional reactions and attitudes towards digital autocracy, people's privacy attitudes hardly change even after knowing about the repressive nature of digital control. Our experimental evidence suggests that people’s privacy attitudes are relatively stable and remain consistent. Furthermore, different privacy attitudes moderate the effect of digital control on people’s emotions and political attitudes in different ways. Most notably, while knowing about digital control decreases positive emotions, increases negative emotions, and worsens people’s political attitudes in general, we find surprisingly oppositive effects among people with trade-offism, fatalism and nothing-to-hide attitudes towards privacy, whereas the effect remain consistent among people who take measures to protect their privacy. The moderating role of perceived privacy is most prominent in the situation of personalized surveillance, i.e., state-led surveillance targeted on individuals’ activities such as monitoring private online behaviors.

Overall, our China-based empirical findings contribute to nuanced understandings about the evolving nature of privacy embedded in a context characterized by digital political control and autocracy. We show that there is a discrepancy between the official claim of what privacy is and how individuals interpret it. The multifaceted privacy attitudes held by the public, as our experimental analysis shows, remain “sticky” or persistent; More importantly, they shape people’s emotional reactions and political attitudes towards digital autocracy in significant and divergent ways. Looking forward, our study implicates that engaging in different privacy attitudes might serve as a fruitful approach to uncovering the conditions under which relationship between digital technologies and public attitudes take place in other political contexts.

Authors

• Danqi Guo, Freie Universität Berlin

• Genia Kostka, Freie Universität Berlin