With the recent discussion around the rollout of various track and trace/test and trace apps in the UK and other countries to help contain the spread of COVID-19, it got me thinking about various issues around privacy. A recent article from the Wall Street Journal highlights that employers may be asking about your weekend plans in the name of safety and reducing the spread of infection. This kind of privacy monitoring is grossly invasive even if it is framed as being for the ‘greater good’.

Some people are naturally private people, and others are more extroverted and open. Social media, especially with photo and video-based platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, allows people to share their lives with friends, family, and more often than not, complete strangers. So what’s to stop your employer from checking on your weekend plans and quizzing you on a Monday?

While we often think of our social media as being confined to our followers and perhaps those we interact with the most, the reality is that unless your account is on private lockdown, anyone can view your social media – with or without your knowledge. There’s nothing to stop your boss from checking up on you, even if that seems unethical. It’s something we’re always warned about when looking for new jobs, to tidy our social profiles. It’s what they do from that point of observation when it might become problematic.

Social Privacy and Personal Experience 

I’ve had this illustrated to me in a couple of ways. At university, as part of a lecture on social media privacy, our lecturer pulled up a number of our Facebook profiles onto the projector and nosed through our holiday photos. It felt incredibly invasive, but in reality, nothing about it was illegal or wrong. The images were there to be viewed publicly, and that’s exactly what we were doing.

More recently, I had an encounter that gave me a stark reminder of how social media is not just visible, but open to extreme misinterpretation.

In October 2019 I fell from a horse and broke my pelvis, putting me on crutches and off work for 6 weeks. Horse riding is my longest standing passion besides reading and so being unable to ride and visit my stables for so long was difficult. I worked hard on my recovery, walking as much as possible, maintaining my flexibility where I could, and spoke with the hospital consultant and my sports therapist about when I could get back in the saddle.

After 7 weeks, I decided to test out how the injury was coping and went for a 10 minute walk on a horse. I didn’t feel any excessive discomfort, and I excitedly shared this moment on my Instagram stories. The following week, when I was in the office, one of my seniors called me out on this and questioned why I was out riding when I wasn’t yet back in the office full time (I was doing a few days a week at home still due to a 2 hour commute involving two trains).

I felt incensed; how dare my personal social media and out of work activities be brought against me like this? Where do they get off on telling me how to manage my recovery – and what do they know about horse riding and my ability? I left the meeting feeling angry and irritated by people taking things out of context instead of just asking me how my recovery was going and what my plan was.

Ultimately, I made the decision to share that clip. I didn’t think it would be taken out of context and nor did I think one of my seniors would take the time to a) watch it and b) question me on it. For me, I was sharing a pivotal moment after being stuck on crutches. I didn’t expect my private life to be leveraged against me to speed up a full return to work. I created a rod for my own back inadvertently, but I still believe this was an invasion of privacy and should not have been used against me as it was.

Social media is often used to aid in convictions and report offenses. What people post online can and will be used as evidence for crimes – as it should be. It has been a staple of social movement and change for over ten years now – notably with the Arab Spring in 2010 and the recent tragic and unlawful death of George Floyd, both of which were been driven by social media and incited huge social upheaval. While we cannot argue against the use of social media content in supporting justice and law, where is the line? With the COVID-19 crisis continuing around the world, does the virus warrant employers and governments to know our every movement and activity in the name of health and safety?

The Panopticon Tower 

I’m reminded of the panopticon, a type of prison structure in which a watchtower is able to observe the detainees without them ever being able to know if they are being watched – the idea being that they self-police as they never know who is watching or when. Michel Foucault’s 1975 work Discipline and Punish identified the panopticon as a metaphor for modern discipline and how we have a number of social constraints designed to stop us from misbehaving; therefore you have a population who abide by the law and self-police because of these ingrained ideas.

So is social media a panopticon? Perhaps, but instead of self-policing it’s more a case of self-awareness and projecting a desired image of yourself. You post what you want and you may have some idea of who is seeing it, but in reality, anyone could be viewing it. It can be taken out of context and used against you by anyone who has access to it.

But we are not living in a prison society. Western society is predicated on a number of freedoms, and being able to exercise those freedoms is part of what makes society great. The moment those freedoms are taken advantage of, either intentionally or under a mask of government science, things start to unravel and cries of Big Brother and 1984 start to resonate all too easily.

It’s important to not let wider issues like COVID-19 undermine key freedoms like privacy, and most importantly, to be vigilant and aware of what you could be agreeing to when these types of test and trace programme roll out. So if your boss asks what you’re up to at the weekend, I would say use judgement wisely and ask yourself if they’re being friendly, or checking up on you.