In short, employers are expected to balance their right to collect employee information with their employees’ rights to privacy. Naturally then, privacy setting-induced gatekeeping has emerged most forcefully in places where there are clear and exorbitant power imbalances: in the workplace in education and in low-competition commercial environments.Įmployee information is governed by a complex web of federal and provincial privacy legislation, collective bargaining agreements, legal decisions, and the Charter of Right and Freedoms. This becomes increasingly more apparent as newspaper companies around the world move to introduce pay walls for their content. Media companies–newspapers, broadcasters, publishers, record labels, and now, social media networks–act as gatekeepers by filtering information for dissemination to the public, and in so doing, they control access to that information. The clearest and perhaps most well-known example of gatekeeping lies with the media. In controlling access, gatekeepers will usually also control the terms. Gatekeeping emerges most often when there is unequal power distribution between two or more parties, and therefore unequal ability to control access to something. ing / noun / the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something.In the workplace or in education, for example, it can mean losing access to a new job opportunity or to higher quality education.Įmployees, students, and consumers are increasingly being asked to trade their personal information for access to education, the workforce and consumer products, giving rise to a brand-new class of gatekeeping. In the absence of a fall-back option, however, saying no means much more. Saying ‘no’ in this context means missing out on tailored, or higher quality services and settling for the fall-back option: the basics. In many areas of our lives, saying ‘yes’ to privacy policies has become a necessary prerequisite to access–whether that be access to lower insurance rates, personalized banking, or other products and services.
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