The Circle Warns Us: Privacy is Not a Right
It is easy to agree that privacy, in its purest form, should be an inherent human right. Every individual deserves the ability to choose to give out their personal information, to have their photo shared, to have their lives on display. As Mae progresses in the company, she gives more and more of her time and data to The Circle, spending all of her hours commenting and interacting with her coworkers on their company social media site and answering surveys through her headset. Towards the peak of Mae's career, she even wears a camera around her neck that films and captures audio of her life every second of the day. This philosophy of constant surveillance and data consumption is summed up by Circle leader Eamon Bailey when he states that “privacy is theft” (305). Bailey believes that it should be criminal for someone to withhold information or data from anyone else who has a desire to know it. This idea of The Circle is exaggerated by Eggers in order to demonstrate the inherent issues in the philosophy of The Circle. The company's latest and greatest product of the SeeChange cameras allows anyone to view a variety of cameras set up by anyone in the world. With these cameras, Bailey attempts to eliminate privacy from anyone with the guise of doing it for security and anti-theft reasons. When debuting the cameras, he even shows his own mother walking around the house in the towel as she is being filmed without her consent (69). Later in the novel, when Mae goes “transparent” and wears a camera around her neck at all times, she walks in on her parents having sex (371-2). Even as brainwashed as Mae is at this point, she begs Bailey to erase the footage but he refuses because, at The Circle, “you know we don’t delete.” Mae recognizes that her parents deserve that privacy and she stole it from them. These examples clearly illustrate the issue with removing someone’s privacy and reinforce the generally adopted belief that privacy should be a right.
However, the technology of our society today makes it nearly impossible for anyone to be able to protect that right. While our society is not quite as far gone as in The Circle, there are many similarities in how we sign over our rights. When Mae first joins the Circle, she is given a slew of papers and documents to sign and is encouraged not to read them. That can be seen on every application or website today when you must “agree to the Terms & Conditions,” that no one reads. Mae is also constantly monitored by The Circle through her heart rate and caloric intake, her speed and scores in customer experience, and her mandatory posting on the Circle social media pages. Companies today reserve a similar right to monitor the content of their employees’ computers and phones and how they spend their time while clocked in. By accepting the job, the right to privacy in those areas are forfeited. This idea of relinquishing your privacy goes hand in hand with social media use. One of the most well-known quotes from The Social Dilemma is, "If you're not paying for the product then you are the product." By using social media services, we are selling our data to advertisers so that they can market to us in the most effective way possible. The social media sites themselves make a profit through these advertisers, so they want to get people to spend the most time possible on their apps. By using social media we are choosing to relinquish our right to our our own data.
These companies would argue that while they are using our data and invading our privacy, we are choosing to give it up. There is always an option to opt out. Yet, if we look at the way our society runs, it seems like maybe it isn’t much of a choice at all. It’s very hard to get ahead in life without succumbing to the norms of our society like having an iPhone with FaceID and tracking, linking your bank account to ApplePay, saving all of your photos onto the Cloud, posting your location and personal information on social media sites, and other things.
Although The Circle shows extreme examples of this through their SeeChange cameras and Mae’s insane engagement levels on The Circle social media sites, it is clear that signing away our right to privacy is so commonplace in our society today that people often don’t think twice about it. In this way, privacy is really a privilege that is given to the most advantaged, but is achievable to the least advantaged. Those who are the most privileged in society can pay for the most protections over their data and privacy, just like we see with the Three Wise Men in The Circle. But for those who are disadvantaged in society, they need to comply with these technologies because that is their best bet at getting ahead. Our society promotes these privacy-stealing technologies and companies so much that those without the means to opt out are the most taken advantage of. This is precisely what The Social Dilemma aims to educate viewers on. These social media companies portray a picture of privacy being a right that its users are choosing to give up in exchange for the service. But if we dig deeper into the system of how our society works, privacy becomes a privilege that is given to the wealthiest and most powerful and taken from the vulnerable.
As responsible citizens, we need to think about not only what we are posting and viewing, but also how we interact with social media and how much time and data we allow it to take from us.