Digitalization of Society and Socio-political Issues 1

6The Hypothesis of the Privacy of Ancients and Moderns

“The Internet is a threat to privacy”. This sentence expresses a conclusion, a generally shared feeling, whether in the press, in militant and political speeches, or in academic literature. In this academic literature, there is a regular reference to the “privacy paradox”. In a nutshell, this paradox results from the observation of the contradiction between the expression of a strong attachment to “privacy” and the observed behaviors of hyper-displaying oneself (Carré and Panico 2012) which, in practice, transgress the border between public and private space and contribute to one’s own surveillance (Carré and Panico 2011; Lyon 2015). The behavior of Facebook users is regularly mentioned to illustrate this famous paradox (Acquisti and Gross 2006; Estienne 2011). These are often referred to as “naïve” and “attentive” (Walczak 2014, p. 504) and some online behaviors as “pathological” (Granjon 2011; Sziklay 2016), partly because of this paradox. According to Anita Allen (1999), we should even go so far as to “coerce”, in some cases, privacy behaviors.

Studies that have analyzed this “privacy paradox” have shown the existence of a market failure for the exploitation of personal data and, if we share the assumption that privacy is conceived as a market, of the privacy market (Rochelandet 2010). In such a context, the behavior of digital content consumers who claim to be concerned about protecting their privacy while endangering ...