Organizing privacy: cultural and structural constraints on activist use of privacy enhancing technologies

Abstract

The digital revolution has reshaped activism over the last thirty years and yet we know little about how social movement groups weigh the benefits and risks of new digital technologies. With an increase in the use of digital tools, we have also seen an increase in digital surveillance and security threats. Here, we ask how organizational culture and structure intersect to shape activists’ adoption of technologies, particularly Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), which provide greater control over who can access digital data. Based on forty activist interviews from thirty-three distinct movement groups, we find that bureaucratic groups face significant barriers in choosing PETs, in comparison to smaller, informal movement groups. We trace these barriers to distinct cultural orientations and structural constraints embedded in formalized organizations. Culturally, bureaucracies embrace moderate, mainstream tactics and ideologies, based in complex, stable, and mass-membership structures. Currently available PETs are a poor fit for this combination of elements. In contrast, smaller groups have fewer structural barriers to PETs and demonstrate a wider range of cultures and ideologies. As a result, collectives were better structured to adopt PETs and more likely to view them as necessary. Both kinds of organizations sometimes embraced conspicuous insecurity in technology choices, trying to signal to allies and potential members that they were not radical enough to need privacy. This work has important implications for realistic expectations of achieving privacy from hostile surveillance for designers of PETs, advocates of PETs and activists themselves.