Privacy encounters in Teledialogue

ABSTRACT

Privacy is a major concern when new technologies are introduced between public authorities and private citizens. What is meant by privacy, however, is often unclear and contested. Accordingly, this article utilises grounded theory to study privacy empirically in the research and design project Teledialogue aimed at introducing new ways for public case managers and placed children to communicate through IT. The resulting argument is that privacy can be understood as an encounter, that is, as something that arises between implicated actors and entails some degree of friction and negotiation. An argument which is further qualified through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. The article opens with a review of privacy literature before continuing to present privacy as an encounter with five different foci: what technologies bring into the encounter; who is related to privacy by implication; what is entailed by the spaces of Teledialogue; how privacy relates to projected futures; and how privacy is also an encounter between authority and care. In the end, it is discussed how privacy conceptualised as an encounter is not already there surrounding people or places but rather has to be traced in the specific and situated relations between implicated actors, giving rise to different normative concerns in each case.

KEYWORDS:

• Privacy
• encounter
• Deleuze
• Teledialogue

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their appreciation to the placed children and case managers for helping to design and research Teledialogue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lars Bo Andersen is researching technology and social change where he, among others, has studied empowerment, development and Actor-Network Theory through the One Laptop per Child initiative. [email: [email protected]].

Ask Risom Bøge was coordinator of the Surveillance in Denmark project and has worked on the Danish DNA database, surveillance and Actor-Network Theory. [email: [email protected]].

Peter Danholt is head of the Centre for STS studies, Aarhus University. He researches technology, governance and knowledge production as practices based on Science, Technology and Society studies (STS). [email: [email protected]].

Peter Lauritsen is head of the research project ‘Childhood, Intimacy and Surveillance Practices’, was a co-founder of the Danish Association for Science and Technology Studies and was head of the research project ‘Surveillance in Denmark’. [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 For simplicity, we use the term ‘children’ for anyone who is not yet of age and, consequently, is subject to the parental rights and responsibilities of others. In this paper, children thus refers to anyone below the Danish legal age of 18. In the case of placed children, their case managers hold formal custody.

Additional information

Funding

We would like to thank the Velux Foundation for funding this work.