Bob Blakley had an interesting post Monday, arguing that technologists tend to frame the privacy issue poorly. (I would add that many non-technologists use the same framing.) Here’s a sample:

That’s how privacy works; it’s not about secrecy, and it’s not about control: it’s about sociability. Privacy is a social good which we give to one another, not a social order in which we control one another.

Technologists hate this; social phenomena aren’t deterministic and programmers can’t write code to make them come out right. When technologists are faced with a social problem, they often respond by redefining the problem as a technical problem they think they can solve.

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The privacy framing that’s going on in the technology industry today is this:

Social Frame: Privacy is a social problem; the solution is to ensure that people use sensitive personal information only in ways that are beneficial to the subject of the information.

BUT as technologists we can’t … control peoples’ behavior, so we can’t solve this problem. So instead let’s work on a problem that sounds similar:

Technology Frame: Privacy is a technology problem; since we can’t make people use sensitive personal information sociably, the solution is to ensure that people never see others’ sensitive personal information.

We technologists have tried to solve the privacy problem in this technology frame for about a decade now, and, not surprisingly (information wants to be free!) we have failed.

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The technology frame isn’t the problem. Privacy is the problem. Society can and routinely does solve the privacy problem in the social frame, by getting the vast majority of people to behave sociably.

This is an excellent point, and one that technologists and policymakers would be wise to consider. Privacy depends, ultimately, on people and institutions showing a reasonable regard for the privacy interests of others.

Bob goes on to argue that technologies should be designed to help these social mechanisms work.

A sociable space is one in which people’s social and antisocial actions are exposed to scrutiny so that normal human social processes can work.

A space in which tagging a photograph publicizes not only the identities of the people in the photograph but also the identities of the person who took the photograph and the person who tagged the photograph is more sociable than a space in which the only identity revealed is that of the person in the photograph – because when the picture of Jimmy holding a martini washes up on the HR department’s desk, Jimmy will know that Johnny took it (at a private party) and Julie tagged him – and the conversations humans have developed over tens of thousands of years to handle these situations will take place.

Again, this is an excellent and underappreciated point. But we need to be careful how far we take it. If we go beyond Bob’s argument, and we say that good design of the kind he advocates can completely solve the online privacy problem, then we have gone too far.

Technology doesn’t just move old privacy problems online. It also creates new problems and exacerbates old ones. In the old days, Johnny and Julie might have taken a photo of Jimmy drinking at the office party, and snail-mailed the photo to HR. That would have been a pretty hostile act. Now, the same harm can arise from a small misunderstanding: Johnny and Julie might assume that HR is more tolerant, or that HR doesn’t watch Facebook; or they might not realize that a site allows HR to search for photos of Jimmy. A photo might be taken by Johnny and tagged by Julie, even though Johnny and Julie don’t know each other. All in all, the photo scenario is more likely to happen today than in the pre-Net age.

This is just one example of what James Grimmelmann calls Accidental Privacy Spills. Grimmelmann tells the story of a private email message that was forwarded and re-forwarded to thousands of people, not by malice but because many people made the seemingly harmless decision to forward it to a few friends. This would never have happened with a personal letter. (Personal letters are sometimes publicized against the wishes of the author, but that’s very rare and wouldn’t have happened in the case Grimmelmann describes.) As the cost of capturing, transmitting, storing, and searching photos and other digital information falls to near-zero, it’s only natural that more capturing, transmitting, storing, and searching of information will occur.

Good design is not the whole solution to our privacy problem. But design has the huge advantage that we can get started on it right away, without needing to reach some sweeping societal agreement about what the rules should be. If you’re designing a product, or deciding which product to use, you can support good privacy design today.