Puzzling over privacy

Posted on | June 21, 2011 | No Comments

Photo credit: Kaukab Jhumra Smith, 2011

When I went for a walk on the beach with my cousin a couple of Sundays ago, I did not expect to find myself in a Facebook video shot and shared by someone with more than 2,500 friends.

We were at Clifton Beach, the most publicly accessible and over-developed of Karachi’s shores. Plastic wrappers, soda bottles, fruit peel and animal waste lay intermingled with cream-colored seashells and stringy dark seaweed on the distinctive shimmery grey sand. This was the kind of beach where you kept your shoes on.

Yet an hour and a half later, my cousin Rakshanda and i found ourselves plastered in silvery sand as we raised and lowered ourselves into various yoga poses right there in front of the waves. Around us, about nine other people, all men, tried to follow the directions shouted into the ocean wind by an athletic blond woman. I felt sticky but euphoric at our long walk and the chance to meditate into the sea-scented breeze.

The woman, Dr. Zsuzsanna Fajcsak, a Hungarian native and a fitness and life coach, leads a seven-kilometer walk followed by a 15-minute yoga session on Clifton Beach every Sunday morning. What I didn’t know at the time is that Dr. Zsu is also big on sharing the group’s activities on Facebook and building a larger following. When I first realized she was conducting interviews during our walk with a little yellow digital camera, I felt a little uncomfortable. And when I realized our yoga poses in the sand were also being captured on camera, I felt a little powerless.

Pakistan is a conservative country, and I was not sure I wanted pictures of myself in odd positions in the sand floating around the Internet. My discomfort was not enough to make me stop what I was doing, though, and I did not speak up about my feelings or ask for the camera to be put away. While Dr. Zsu put up several pictures and videos of the walk on her public Facebook profile that evening, none were the dreaded shots of me doing the downward dog in my sand-covered gear.

But this incident did raise some questions for me about the nature of privacy, and our own expectations, in this age of instant media and online sharing.

• Was it unrealistic of me to expect my actions to remain private when I was part of a group in a public setting like the beach?
• Do social media users have any responsibility to ask permission before they record a person’s actions with the intention of sharing the recording? Would this responsibility change if they intended to share the recording just among their friends, rather than publicly?
• Should cultural context — like a country’s socially conservative climate — play any part in determining the answer to these questions?
• And most intriguing of all, have Facebook’s fungible privacy settings loosened our own definition of personal space? Now that we can calibrate “private” as something that we share with our friends, or with the friends of our friends, or with the world at large, our concept of privacy has been turned into a spectrum, a veritable rainbow of variation. Would I have been less disturbed at having my images out there if the user who shared them had 100 friends, rather than 2,500?

Probably. But I’ll be the first to admit that doesn’t make much sense.

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