There are times when I feel like an outlier compared with my digital peers.
At a time when many of them are happily sharing all kinds of information about their professional and personal lives, I have been fairly cautious about showing all of my cards to everyone on the Web because I think there should be a healthy divide between our public and private lives.
In many ways, I’m on the outside looking in, particularly compared with younger people who think nothing on sharing everything and anything, particularly on places such as Facebook.
While I’m still trying to digest all the news coming out of Facebook’s F8 developer conference yesterday, it has become apparent that online privacy has come to a serious fork in the road with two distinct paths.
One path that is we surrender our online privacy, and live with the reality that everything we do and disclose online will be available to anyone. The second path – and one that I don’t see happening – is people wake up to the new reality that online privacy could be a thing of the past, and the pendulum swings away from full disclosure.
As much as online services such as Facebook, Blippy, Twitter and Foursquare are interesting, entertaining and valuable, they’re also companies in the business of data and, increasingly, they are sharing and aggregating the information that we happily provide them about our interests, purchases and activity.
All of this activity is happening behind the scenes but few people seemed concerned about our data being used this way. Perhaps I’m overly-concerned or maybe ahead of the pack but sooner or later people should start to realize that the stuff you share online is being used in many different ways by many different companies.
If you can live with having a public and social existence carry on but if you have any concerns about privacy, it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.
We aren’t surrendering our privacy, we’re volunteering it.
I guess my question is “what are you protecting?”. What you’re doing or eating or thinking (and where) is innocuous stuff in my books. I for one am glad to know what you’re thinking.
Besides, privacy went the way of the dodo a looong time ago. Credit card companies track your purchases, so can banks, and they pour over that information to make decisions. Canada Post has all sorts of information about you. Want a loan? Gotta expose your credit history. Got a car with OnStar? You’re tracked. Same with your cell phone. Got a Mac? It’s ‘phoning home’ every few minutes…even the calculator app makes calls to Apple HQ! I just did a WHOIS lookup on this domain. Do you still live on Melville? Is your number 5385-xxx?
See my point?
At least Facebook or FourSquare gives you the choice not to participate, but eventually I see that going away too.
Bottom line: privacy is has been a fiction for 20 years.
heh, got the wrong number, that’s the technical contact, yours is list as 669-xxxx
Mark, I totally agree. What concerns me most is how well this content is “protected” by those who have it and how they’ll be using it themselves.
Trevor, I almost agree with you point but most of those organizations are heavily regulated and totally accountable for everything they do. The new wave of online service (Facebook being a classic example) has no body overseeing what they do. Hence they seem to go by the mantra of “Catch me, then I’ll fix it, maybe”. The scary part is that we’ve been conditioned into believing we’re safe because of the regulations posed on those organizations we trust but that is not at all the case when using the social web. The average person doesn’t understand that.