(It’s been a long time since I last wrote an essay; this is a bit messy, but I’ll gradually restore the blog update frequency in the near future~)
The recent 315 gala seems to have taken a heavy toll on many IT companies that did not advertise properly on CCTV. Apple has always been arrogant; you can criticize it for arrogance all you want, but this time NetEase has probably really fallen into trouble.
As for the news media’s habit of reporting some negative information in a kind of campaign-style, entertainmentized, highly selective and biased manner, that behavior is contemptible. But in general I do not object to this kind of entertainmentization and bias, because public opinion, especially television media, is by nature eye-candy first, entertainment to death. It is inappropriate to hold “mass” media to the standards of academia. Of course, mass media do need to abide by legal constraints, for example they must not deliberately fabricate things or maliciously defame people, and so on (though CCTV’s anti-counterfeit crusade seems to have touched some bottom lines). But within the bounds of legality, to adopt certain focusing, exaggerating, and embellishing techniques, I think there is nothing to make a fuss about. My attitude toward the “Southern” media is similar: the fundamental problem with the Left is that they take themselves too seriously. Although they use the masses as a shield, in fact they are simply incapable of adapting to the force of the “masses”… Of course, the problem with CCTV is that in fact it is not a mass medium at all, but an official mouthpiece wielding enormous power, so it cannot be compared on the same footing with the Southern Press group or Hunan Satellite TV and the like. Even if there are all kinds of satire online about CCTV’s conduct, and all kinds of in-depth discussions about NetEase, the impact of CCTV’s reporting on ordinary people is hard to offset.
I’ve gone off on a tangent… I’m not necessarily trying to strike back at CCTV; I just happen to want to use this as a chance to talk about the issue of privacy in the Internet age.
What NetEase was mainly “exposed” for were two things: first, that certain parts of its website had code from a third-party company embedded to obtain users’ browsing records; second, that NetEase Mail apparently could “see” the contents of emails and then accurately place ads based on them.
Of course, there is a lot of exaggeration in this. Part of it is the result of CCTV’s sensationalism; another part is because NetEase was also exaggerated by the undercover investigators, since CCTV went undercover by pretending to be customers. In order to solicit business, marketing staff who do not know the full situation often boast too much, and since they are facing nonprofessionals, their introductions may be overly simplified. For example, the industry practice of using machines to identify keywords in email content for precision ad placement was simply described as being able to “see” the content. In fact, nowadays many free email services, led by Gmail, all adopt this strategy: you use the service for free, and the website makes profits by harvesting data. Although this practice is controversial, it is also one of the industry’s “unwritten rules.” Those who cannot accept it should either choose a paid mailbox or buy a server and set up their own mail system; otherwise, since you want to use it for free, you can only abide by the industry’s conventions.
The issue of embedding third-party code is similar. In the final analysis, it is still about obtaining data in order to place ads with precision. The professional term cookie, which has not been very well translated into Chinese, was demonized by CCTV; I suggest translating cookie as “small data”: when we visit certain websites, some browsing data are recorded on our computers, and when not prohibited, the website can obtain this data. In many cases this data is necessary. For example, when I log into Amazon, put one book after another into my cart, and finally pay, the website side must know that this series of operations comes from the same user. Without cookies, many operations might still be possible, but implementation would be extremely troublesome. Of course, cookies themselves only contain small amounts of data such as the browsing trail on the website, but what about what the advertising company said in the CCTV program—that it could learn “location, interests and hobbies, age, monthly family income, and even personal information such as IP address” from cookies? Location and IP address can be obtained directly; the word “even” should be used for items such as interests and hobbies, age, and income. These items are generally not directly extracted from “small data,” but are inferred by analyzing vast amounts of small data, summarizing your Internet habits, and then estimating them through statistical analysis. Through such analysis, in addition to helping place ads more precisely, it can also support many kinds of data-mining research, on a scale of samples that no traditional form of social survey can ever approach.
This is precisely one of the trends in the so-called Big Data era. The two largest Internet companies in the world are Google and Facebook; of course, both of them also collect huge amounts of users’ browsing habits. Some do this through the websites themselves, such as Gmail and Facebook; others do it by adding code to other websites, such as Google’s Analytics and Adsense. Unfortunately, my Suixuan site also has these two services embedded. In addition, I have inserted Jiathis code into article pages to provide the “share to” function, and this function also gives data to Jia Network.
Of course, inserting the code of one website into another website seems to have been done without the user’s consent, but this is indeed a common practice. Even the largest portal sites often have to use ads delivered by third-party advertising companies—so they inevitably have to embed code from external sites. In fact, this is also reasonable. Just imagine: if the ad code were also provided by the website itself, and the customer’s browsing and clicking behavior were entirely under the website’s control, then if the website fabricated or falsely reported the ad results, how could the advertiser feel at ease? Advertisers would of course prefer to entrust ad code to professional advertising companies rather than directly to small and medium-sized website owners. If third-party code were prohibited, then apart from the very largest Internet companies, a large number of small and medium-sized websites would be unable to survive.
Of course, beyond these practical reasons, we should also talk about ethics—if collecting users’ browsing habits is wrong in itself, then no matter how important it is to the survival of website owners, or even if one says it supports the development trend of the entire Internet world and the like, we still have to deny it. But the question is: what exactly is the ethical issue here?
“Privacy” — our privacy seems to have been violated. But what is privacy?
Privacy of course is challenged in the Internet age, because “privacy” itself is historical and related to the way life is lived in different eras.
The most primitive concept of “privacy” probably meant “hiding private parts”; what people first learned to cover up may have been the private parts of their bodies. In primitive society, apart from the human body, there was hardly anything that was “private.” It was only once the distinction between public and private emerged that the private came to mean “private property.” But the concept of “private life” as opposed to public life did not appear until modern times. In antiquity, “private life” was roughly equivalent to one’s personal property; what separated public and private was the wall of one’s own house. And in cultures such as China’s, which especially emphasize family life, there was yet another sphere of family life between the public and the individual. So beyond public affairs and household affairs, “private matters” had very little room, and even this space did not yet have especially clear boundaries. For example, I seem to have seen Jiang Xiaoyuan mention that in ancient China, when young masters and mistresses were having sex, there would often be maids standing by to attend to them.
When introducing McLuhan, I mentioned that the emergence of “private space” is related to the fact that visual space came to dominate in the print era. In traditional society, most of people’s activities were carried out together with others, especially those activities that were “information-rich,” which were almost all conducted in public space. Only written text could demand and support a personal, undisturbed activity space. But this change also unfolded gradually. In the beginning, books were always placed in public settings and read aloud, and study rooms were also more of a social venue at first. Perhaps not until the late modern period, that is, since the Enlightenment, did the sacred inviolability of “private space” truly become a widespread consciousness, and this developed in step with the spread of print culture.
But even within print culture, so-called “privacy” did not have much informational content. Privacy developed from the original “private parts” to “private property,” then all the way to “private life” and “private space,” but the concept of “private information” seems to be something even more recent.
The earliest private information was perhaps “information” in the literal sense, namely private letters. Letters are often a form of private exchange that one does not wish to make public, but unlike private exchanges as a “living space,” letters on the one hand are a communicative activity in progress, and on the other hand can be intercepted, preserved, passed on to others, or published. In other words, only from the time of letters did “privacy” cease to be something that could only be instantly “peeped at,” and become something that could also be “stolen.”
But in antiquity and even in the early modern period, letters were not regarded as a particularly important part of personal life. It was only when transportation and communication became sufficiently developed that letters became an important form of social interaction, but even then they were limited to educated people, and the content of letters depended on the writer’s own composition. That is to say, it was always up to the author to decide how much “privacy” could be disclosed to which audiences; the author could even decide to make it completely public, for example by writing open letters or publishing collections of letters. Even if these letters were stolen or snooped on against the author’s wishes, the author still knew full well what had been leaked.
And it is precisely in the Internet age, or the so-called “information age,” that on the one hand people’s private lives have begun to display enormous richness, while on the other hand these rich details can be obtained as “information.”
Ironically, when the Internet first rose, one important accusation leveled against it was its “anonymity”—the idea that on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. And this supposed anonymity precisely suggests that the boundary between private space and public space has been broken: people do hidden things in public space, and behavior is separated from its subject; a non-public subject may engage in public acts.
Is the Internet a public space? It seems so. Yet the activity of accessing this public space has itself become a kind of private life. The Internet user sits alone at home clicking the mouse—we naturally tend to think of this as a private activity, yet the essence of this private activity is access to a public space. Just imagine: in the traditional world, when I go visit a store, a school, or an exhibition hall, whether or not I am publishing public information, the act of visiting itself belongs to public life. But on the Internet, the boundary between public and private becomes very blurry.
Of course, in the traditional world, I might also not want others to know which day I went to a store, what time I went to an exhibition hall, and so on. But on the one hand, tracking me and processing this kind of information is not common; on the other hand, we also know the principle that if you don’t want people to know, you had better not do it. Since one acts in broad daylight, one must always be prepared to be seen.
But in the Internet world, concealment and tracking have both become easy. On the one hand, not only when we visit a certain web address, but even when we publish remarks publicly, we can wear masks and hide our identities; on the other hand, all of our footprints will be comprehensively and automatically recorded.
Because most of the things Internet companies record are anonymous footprint data left in the public sphere, rather than the ripping off of masks to identify who you are, they claim not to have violated people’s privacy. But Internet users feel that this kind of anonymous activity is itself a kind of private activity, and therefore snooping on such activity is an invasion of privacy.
In a sense, both views are correct. The key lies in the interweaving of the boundaries between private space and public space, and the separation between personal identity and personal activity.
Thus, the issue of privacy in the Internet age is not merely a legal or moral issue, but more a historical and philosophical issue. We must rethink what privacy is, trace back, and redefine the boundaries between private space and public space.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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