Stuck in Isabel's Garden: Anthropomorphic Metaphors and the Oversimplification of Digital Privacy

Digital privacy is confusing. As such, technology companies deploy anthropomorphic metaphors to simplify what digital privacy means. By leveraging the familiarity of the body, such metaphors ostensibly make the intangible complexity of digital privacy graspable. Yet by anthropomorphizing technologies involved in the transformation of the discourse of privacy into a discourse of digital privacy, such metaphors confound the promise of "more-than-human" ontology. Through constant comparative analysis of the role that human embodiment plays in historical and contemporary discourses of privacy, this paper weighs the philosophical costs of using anthropomorphic metaphors to simplify the discourse of digital privacy. I argue that anthropomorphic metaphors problematically align contemporary technologies with an anachronistic discourse of the human, rather than productively surfacing more-than-human possibilities for understanding entangled modes of being. I provide theoretical implications for research in computing that hopes to harness the non-anthropocentric sensitivity of the "more-than-human" to effect responsible change in the world.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models; Ubiquitous and mobile computing theory, concepts and paradigms; • Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy.