On (some aspects of) social privacy in the social media space

Abstract

Key Points

• This commentary ties in with an emerging field in privacy scholarship that focuses on collective rather than individualistic viewpoints: recent debates address privacy in digital markets in terms of individual rights to choose between different options, such as between Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter, while users of digital platforms try to make sense of who they are and how they fit into networked contexts.
• In such contexts, audiences are hidden and almost anything that users share is in plain view. Privacy is thus to be found within public environments rather than in opposition to them—that is, by controlling access to meaning rather than by controlling access to content.
• While legal scholarship is mostly built around the assumption that consumers have to choose to be private or to be public, in digital markets, privacy and publicity are inevitably muddled.
• Drawing on the German Federal Court of Justice’s recent Facebook decision, the commentary observes that reclaiming privacy in digital markets depends not just on selecting between different options but also on being able to make choices in relation to them.