Rethinking Digital Privacy

A friend and I were talking over email about my accountability vs. friendship piece. At one point I said:

Most guys who do battle temptation to pornography are trying to wage that battle while making very little or zero changes to their overall consumption/tech habits. This is roughly comparable to a lothario trying to reform his ways but refusing to relocate from his apartment atop the brothel.

To which my friend responded:

The overnight tech changes put porn in one's work, bedroom, bathroom, and finally pocket. My dad (a wise Christian father) insisted on putting a desktop in my room—against my objections!

Grant for one moment my suggestion that “accountability groups” developed in large part over the issue of pornography. Would it be fair to suggest that a big part of this epidemic in evangelical life was privacy? More specifically, did a lot of American Christians set themselves and their families up for moral and emotional crisis by combining techno-maximalism—we just gotta have cable and broadband—with a really, really destructive presupposition that anyone over the age of 5 is entitled to consumption and recreation behind locked doors?

The best I can tell, there’s been little in the way of reckoning with how Christians have absorbed secular valuations of “privacy.” Consider 1 Thessalonians 4:10-12:

…[W]e urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, ¹¹ and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, ¹² so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.

In the sense that “privacy” means the desire to live and work quietly, so that our gospel witness is not ruptured by pride or noseyness, Christians should, according to Paul, aspire to some kind of privacy. But the command to “to mind your own affairs” is a plural command. It’s a command given to a community. Paul is not saying that Christian A has no business asking how life is going for Christian B (we know this because earlier in the chapter Paul commands the church to abstain from sexual immorality and says that one who commits such sin “wrongs his brother”). Privacy, in the sense of the individual having his life to himself, away from the view and help of others, is foreign to Christian wisdom. Yet this is the exact sense of privacy that we evangelicals have often absorbed from the ambient culture.

I’m consistently amazed at how many online forums and advice columns I read where people acknowledge that their spouses do not know the passwords to their digital devices or social media accounts. You can find a lot of resources that encourage couples to maintain this kind of private life their covenant partner cannot reach. Obviously, a lot of people believe that strict privacy and deep relational intimacy are compatible; this fact might explain why a growing number of American adults can’t and may not even want to find a relationship.

People get uneasy at critiques of privacy, and not without reason. Surveillance capitalism is a thing. So is over-sharing, and the seeming indifference of society toward exposing children to things they’re not ready for. Privacy has its blessings. But technological change creates categories of privacy that become, as the technology advances, more and more untethered from the good. A house with walls is private, but in a much different way than a locked smartphone is private. Two or three people can have a private conversation, and yet this “secret” exists in a different way than texts and searches.

Perhaps one way of thinking about it is this: Tools of privacy are boundaries that can either circumscribe a relationship—the closed door on my house creates privacy between me and my family— or they can circumscribe consumption. Most digital privacy falls into the latter category. The two great symbols of privacy in the electronic age are the password and the headphones. Both of these technologies are capable of either kind of privacy, but practically speaking, they are mostly used in the service of private consumption. My password protects my own personal social media use. My headphones don’t reveal what I’m streaming. Digital consumption insists on privacy.

As far as I can tell, there’s not been very much theological thinking on this topic. Most of it, indeed, is reactive. Software that monitors your browsing history and sends a report to an accountability partner is not really holistic rethinking of privacy; it’s more of an emergency intervention. In fact, the advantage of such software is that it’s entirely compatible with a lifestyle of digital consumption. The software is watching you so that you can consume and consume with greater holiness.

Not long ago I was asked by someone for any wisdom on screen time for young kids. I said: When it comes to screens, bigger is better. Too many parents assume that handing a kid an iPad is actually better than turning on Bluey on the family TV because the iPad feels “educational.” This is incorrect. The more crucial factor is which kind of screen time opens up entertainment and consumption to the whole family, so that people not only can see what’s being watched, but that the presence of other persons alone keeps the consumer from being lost in utter immersion.

I don’t think Christians can baptize secular notions of privacy. The era of digital consumption won’t allow compromise. Either our lives are shot through with a counter cultural sense of openness, or they are set up to make us addicted, enslaved, and alone.