5 - Power, Practice, and Performance

Summary

Inside the information industry, management leverages the tools of coercive bureaucracies to routinize work that serves data-extractive ends. Corporate bureaucracies work subtly to set privacy discourses among company employees, inculcating corporate-friendly understandings of privacy as frontline workers approach their work. Organizations hobble privacy offices and amplify voices that interpret privacy law in ways that serve corporate interests. Management also constrains designers in the design process, feeding software engineers’ ambivalence toward privacy and using organizational structures to make it difficult for anyone to build better privacy protections into the designs of new technologies.