UNDERSTANDING THE MACHINE. In what is almost the reverse of the preceding observations, if it is potentially difficult for would-be users of data about people to understand what the data means, so too is it potentially troublesome for people themselves to see and understand just what systems themselves may be telling them is being done with their data and just what technical descriptions of privacy mechanisms may ‘mean’. In fact a number of researchers have pointed to the distinction between ordinary reasoning about privacy and technical understandings of what privacy mechanisms should look like. The gap between these two ways of looking at privacy, and the potential this creates for users to lose sight of what systems may really be doing with their data, has resulted in some researchers putting a particular emphasis upon the need to make available privacy mechanisms intelligible to users if they are going to be effective, e.g.: “To participate in meaningful privacy practice in the context of technical systems, people require opportunities to understand the extent of the systems’ alignment with relevant practice and to conduct discernible social action through intuitive or sensible engagement with the system” [original italics] (Xxxxxxx et al, 2004) In relation to this Xxxxxxx et al identify particular ways in which intelligibility can be undermined, e.g. by: ‘obscuring potential information flow’; ‘obscuring actual information flow’; ‘emphasizing configuration over action’; there being a lack of ‘coarse-grained control’; and the inhibition of ‘existing practice’. One of the areas where lack of visibility and understanding has received particular interest is in the context of social networking activities. However, whilst acknowledging the need for improved ‘defaults’ and ‘better tools for managing privacy’ some researchers (x.x. Xxx et al, 2011) have suggested that there is not yet enough information about the exact character of issues surrounding privacy in the context of using social networking sites like Facebook. Xxx et al (op cit) found that overall just over a third of all content on Facebook is shared using default privacy settings but that, at the same time, only a third of the privacy settings used “matched users’ expectations”. In relation to this they found that the usual consequence of this was that information was exposed to ‘more users than expected’. They suggest a possible solution here might be to actively use ‘user-created friend lists’ for the management of privac...
