Coming on the heels of a story in New Scientist revealing the NSA is monitoring social networking sites (MySpace, Friendster, etc) comes an interesting conversation about the privacy we are giving up by living so publicly on the web.
Last week, the New York Times ran a piece that really kick started it into gear by publishing a piece about the ever increasing amount of private information we are sharing on social networking services, and unintended consequences.
Scott Karp thinks this will lead to an eventual backlash.
danah boyd had this to say:
Networked technologies not only make this easier, but they also make the snoop invisible. Problematically, people don't sweat the invasion so much because they can't see it.An argument that people make is that you should have nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong. This is sooooo irritating. First, this is only true if you are interested in upholding hegemonic cultural norms. The adorable gay couple next door are doing nothing wrong in my eyes, but their kissing is all sorts of problematic to a government that wants to ban their right to love each other. Aside from queer life, think about all of the decisions you made that aren't necessarily "normal" even if many of us live a pretty privileged life. Second, there's a difference between illegal and not exactly the best impression. I want the ability to pick my nose when i don't think anyone's looking and i don't want a camera to capture me scratching my ass on a cigarette break outside of work. That's just plain embarassing. I don't want to always smile or stand up straight or pretend like i'm in a good mood just because an image might go down on my permanent record. That's just plain exhausting. Third, everything is context dependent. I've done nothing wrong when i stumble out of 1015 drunk as hell and hail a cab, but my drunken stumble is not something that i want to expose to my advisor or, frankly, the government. These are the types of images that people turn around to accuse me of being a citizen or clearly guilty of something else.
MySpace does not mark the beginning of people revealing personal information freely online. We've been moving in this direction since personal home pages became popular back in 1996-1997.
What MySpace's popularity indicates is that the idea of the web as a medium to share our personal identity, in the super-public, is now pervasive and ubiquitous. It has taken hold with an entire generation.
As I mentioned in a comments thread at Scott Karp's, this is like the boiling frog parable: Drop a frog into boiling watter, he'll jump out. Drop a frog into a pot of pleasantly warm water, raise the heat slowly, and the frog will be dead before he knows there's a problem.
So here are two questions to think about:
Are we deciding to pursue "brands of ourselves" online, in a way becoming online celebrities of our own making?
And if so, when we decide to live like this do we waiver our right to privacy as celebrities do?
Related: Slashdot thread.
living online
Karl,
It has always been so -- some people protect their privacy and others share their lives more fully. Some girls hide their diaries, others let their friends read it. The online equivalents are that some people share their personal photos and thoughts and others don't. Telling too much has always had the capacity to come back around and bite you on the hiney. Live in a small town for any length of time and that becomes very clear. For some reason there is the impression that when you post something online it exists in a bubble that only those who love you can get into. And that's just not the way the Internet works, unless you operate in a closed online community. I, too, an often surprised at the things people post or what they write and how it is worded. Our actions and behaviors are more recordable now than ever before but most of what you mention is self-inflicted damage -- people posting their own information, and that may just be a matter of education and awareness.
Comments I wrote on listservs 10 years ago are still floating around. They look very outdated now but at least it pertained to a work topic. I've seen people post emails I've written on their websites without asking or even telling me. It is disconcerting. I would love to see some accepted social conventions develop but there isn't sufficient broad agreement on what is okay and what isn't yet, other than what is set in law ("up skirt" photos, etc.)
Maybe a good corollary question would be what social conventions would we like to see? If you are out in public can you be photographed by anyone with a cell phone camera? I know technologically you can, but is that something we should have to expect and be aware of? Is there any agreed upon privacy for emails? Not business accounts, but private email accounts? Should it be considered "slimey" to broadcast personal emails from someone else? Can photos and emails be altered for humor purposes? I know where I fall on these issues but I don't think I'm on the same wavelength as society in general.
Great comment
And while I agree with you, there have always been some that are more concerned with privacy then others...
I have a suspicion that because it has become so easy to share our identities with others, it has changed the social norms of what we consider private or not.
You touch on that with your very hard follow up questions.
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