Successful Failure: How Foucault Explains Why Facebook "Owns" Your Privacy Choice

TL;DR

The "privacy paradox"—where we say we value privacy but trade it for "likes" and "free" services—is not a sign of human hypocrisy. Instead, as Gordon Hull argues, it is the result of a "successful failure." The "Notice and Consent" pages we click past are designed to fail at protecting us, but they succeed spectacularly at turning us into neoliberal subjects who view our personal lives as commodities to be managed and traded.

The Structural Trap of "Self-Management"

In current legal discourse, privacy is treated as a matter of individual self-management. The logic is simple: if you are notified of the terms and you click "Accept," you have made a rational economic choice.

Hull points out three reasons why this is a fallacy:

1. Information Asymmetry: Users cannot possibly understand the labyrinthine EULAs. Research suggests it would take a user six work-weeks a year just to read the privacy policies of the sites they visit.
2. The Predictability of the Unknown: Data mining means your data is used for things currently unimaginable. "Liking" Curly Fries on Facebook can predict high intelligence; "Liking" Hello Kitty might signal emotional instability to a data broker. You cannot "consent" to a correlation that hasn't been discovered yet.
3. The Illusion of Free Choice: For a college student or someone in a nomadic social environment, leaving Facebook isn't just a "choice"—it's an "exit" from social capital, often becoming a form of social suicide.

Methodology: Foucault and the Neoliberal Subject

Hull moves beyond the "What" to the "How." Why does this failed system persist? Using Michel Foucault’s late work on governmentality, Hull argues that these privacy regimes are "technologies of the self."

• Subjectification: By forcing us to constantly "manage" our privacy settings (even when the interface is designed to frustrate us), platforms train us to see ourselves as homo economicus—entrepreneurs of our own data.
• The Neoliberal Nudge: Behavioral economics is often used to "fix" our irrationality, but Hull argues this further depoliticizes the issue. It frames privacy loss as a "personal risk-management failure" rather than a corporate-driven social harm.

Social Value vs. Individual Commodity

A core insight of the paper is that privacy has positive externalities. Much like environmental protection, if everyone gives up their privacy, the "free zones" required for innovation and democratic dissent vanish for the entire society.

The paper highlights the "Unraveling Effect":

• When "good" actors (like safe drivers) signal their status by accepting surveillance for a discount, it eventually forces everyone else to do the same.
• Eventually, not sharing data becomes a "stigma," implying the individual has something terrible to hide.

Clinical Analysis: The Reality of Resistance

The "privacy paradox" is actually a site of resistance. Users who "clean their walls," use cryptic messaging, or provide fake names are attempting to "refuse what they are" within a system that demands total transparency.

The fact that users express outrage over Facebook's "emotional contagion" studies proves they do care, but they are trapped in a binary (Agree/Disagree) that erases the granularity of human social life.

Conclusion: Beyond the Click

Hull’s work is a sobering reminder that "better settings" or "clearer policies" won't solve the privacy crisis. The problem is the economization of the self. As long as we view privacy as a personal asset to be managed rather than a social right to be protected, we remain exactly the kind of subjects that big data seeks to harvest.

To move forward, we must dismantle the myth that privacy is an individual burden. We must stop asking, "Did you click accept?" and start asking, "What kind of society does this technology force us to become?"