Privacy Violations In Michael Foucault's Panopticon

It lied in the hands of the other citizens themselves, who could turn on someone’s channel and watch them while they slept, while they showered, while they used the bathroom, etc. The feeling that their private information and they, themselves, were at the whim of someone else, someone they did not know or did not trust, contributed to the loss of privacy felt by Quiet’s participants. This feeling of one’s life being in someone else’s hands was likewise represented in Michael Foucault’s idea of the Panopticon. In many ways, Foucault’s Panopticon, originally a model for a prison whose structure would influence and control inmates in the strictest possible way, resembles Harris’s Quiet.
“We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, …show more content…
When in environments like Quiet and the Panopticon, people are forced to constantly wear conflicting faces, and their information is disclosed to anonymous, unknown individuals. “Once crucial point to consider, which has been too often overlooked, is that privacy violation does not depend on what is done or disclosed but to whom it is disclosed.” (Lahlou, 2008, p. 318) This is Lahlou’s primary problem with the Internet; information is disclosed to people to whom it should not be disclosed to. The Internet make us put on faces that are not appropriate to the situation. When ‘we live in public,’ we constantly have a face on, a face that may not match the situation. When we realize that the face we are wearing does not match the situation, we feel hurt by our loss of …show more content…
Inevitably everyone will have a camera and monitor, and it will be fast enough that we can do exactly what we are doing today in this prototype community” (We Live in Public). If Lahlou saw this film, he would definitely have taken issue with this comment. Lahlou sees the privacy loss that occurs on the Internet. Because he believes that privacy breaches occur when ‘lose face,’ Lahlou proposes that the Internet identify the face a user wants to put on in a situation and tailor its function that face. He proposes that only information that is necessary and pertinent for a goal or activity of the Internet be extracted. He believes that it is possible for the Internet to respect people’s boundaries and therefore eliminate any loss of face. The issue with Quiet was that people’s boundaries were not respected. The citizens of Quiet were interrogated and treated quite inhumanely. If this experiment were made to model any aspect of the Internet, it was made to model the Internet at its worst. Lahlou suggests that the Internet can be reformed, and quite easily, at that, to avoid a situation like that presented in Quiet. As We Live in Public shows us, incessant surveillance and complete loss of privacy does not bode well for society. Harris’s Quiet did not end well. Several participants came out of the experiment feeling lonely, depressed and suicidal. Likewise,