What does privacy mean now in a world of sharing and surveillance?

We share more of ourselves online than ever before, but we’re also more conscious about who might be following our digital footprint. Privacy – gaining and maintaining it, both online and IRL – was a common theme that emerged in several pieces of winning work at the 2022 D&AD Awards. In response to this increased focus on Privacy, Rachel Connolly, a writer who explores the ways we use and think about technology, unpacks what privacy really means, and what has fuelled a change in the way we think about it.

Privacy, as a concept, can seem a little vague or theoretical. The standard dictionary definition is: Someone’s right to keep their personal matters and relationships secret. But this is one of those definitions which raises several questions: Which matters are personal and which are public? Who decides? What does it mean to keep something secret? From who? Why is this a right?

The thesaurus likewise shows how slippery a concept it can be to define. It lists words similar to privacy as: aloofness, seclusion, solitude, concealment, isolation, quiet, separation, and so on. These tend to work fine as a substitute for each other, but not really for privacy. “I need solitude” means basically the same thing as “I need isolation”, but “I need privacy” means something different: Privacy is something more than isolation or solitude.

This quality of being hard to define might explain the slightly cavalier attitude to privacy – especially digital privacy – we have seen from many people until fairly recently. Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA documents in the early 2010s prompted some outrage, but didn’t really affect a mass change in the way people use or think of digital communication.

Our inertia may have stemmed partly from the old adage of “Nothing to fear, nothing to hide”. But our culture of sharing all manner of personal information on social media has warped how we think about privacy, too. For a long time now we have been incentivised to blur the already fuzzy line between our public and private lives for likes and shares, to create the impression of intimacy for an audience, and hopefully maximise our influence. In some industries, this maps directly to professional gain.

But it is starting to feel like a seachange is underway. The number of works this year addressing privacy, trying to make it feel concrete, or like a problem which might be easier to manage than we would expect, speaks to this. Why the change?

During Covid, many of our most intimate conversations with family and friends went totally digital, and we started to think more about the importance of these conversations truly being intimate. When the option to “take this offline” vanishes, you are forced to think more about what online actually means.

At the same time, the culture of shaming and moralising on social media, by sharing private communications from dating apps, say, or footage from video encounters, has seemed to worsen. Or perhaps has just felt more prescient because everyone was forced to be online more. This has prompted discussion about the ethics and morality of privacy. Some people may have started asking themselves: Does anyone truly have nothing to hide?

The works for this year that focus on privacy share a theme of trying to make the intangibles of the concept feel “solid”. They all take a theoretical, invisible idea into the realm of the tangible. Privacy-Tracked “brings to life the invasiveness of data tracking” through the metaphor of a man being stalked by human manifestations of apps and data brokers. They follow him into taxis shouting his birthday and hover around him like a mob, noisily absorbing his medical information. The benefits of a simple iPhone app to decline the App Tracking Transparency request seem clear, and personal rather than technical. Likewise, the separate video explainer for the Tracking Transparency App uses simple diagrams and a clear voiceover using non-technical language to put the idea of data tracking into layman's terms. Again, this technical problem is made seem as personal as possible.

The Cookie Factory takes a similar track, by making the invisible work of cookies obvious by showing users how different their experience of the internet would look with someone else's cookie history. The result is a discombobulating portrayal of just how well the internet seems to know you, how much it has collected and stored without you realising. Meanwhile, Camouflage Against Machines uses an eye-catching design of literal camouflage to evoke the danger of surveillance. These camouflage patterns scramble AI-based security cameras, making it hard for them to detect clothing so they don’t work as well. The use of the camouflage pattern associates privacy intrusion with the idea of conflict and being hunted, making it seem like a more pressing threat.

Finally, Privacy Gesture draws attention to the privacy needed for football communications to underline how important Whatsapp encryption is. At a time when more and more intimate conversations have been happening digitally, this feels relevant to many applications beyond sports.

Privacy can feel theoretical or vague until you feel like you’re losing it, or even that you’ve lost it. Say, when you talk to an old friend and something they mentioned, a city or a film, starts appearing on your phone constantly. Or you are pregnant and Instagram seems to know before you’ve told your mother. You feel like something big and important is at stake: the concepts of intimacy and relationships; your ability to think to yourself, without intrusion.

Millennials and younger generations grew up on social media and in a culture of sharing private and public information alike. This may be starting to feel like too much to give up.