The concept of privacy is a tricky one, to say the least. Most people, when asked for a quick response would likely tell you that privacy is very important to them and that they are concerned about who has access to what they consider “private” data about them.
However, these very same people will create Facebook accounts, wander the web without using any sort of anonymous IP cloaking, send emails without encryption and speak loudly on their cell phones at crowded restaurants. Many people are surprised to learn that things like your home address, phone number, email and endless other data is already freely (or at least) easily accessible to anyone handy with a few search engines and a database or two.
As we willingly share more and more information about our day-to-day lives via Twitter or Facebook status updates one has to wonder if we might not be better served giving up on this false sense of privacy and just open the floodgates.
As Matt Asay at CNet says:
Think about it. My in-box already knows where I’m traveling, what I buy, etc. because my receipts go there. If someone were to merge this data with my phone records (easily had for the price of my AT&T login credentials), my e-mail log, and my Twitter, IM, and social network data, they’d know exactly who I know and where I’m likely to bump into them…I’d love to automatically be told that my good friend Mike is in London at the same time as I am, and have a service suggest a reservation at a favorite restaurant (which it would know through my past OpenTable reservations). I’d “pay” for that by giving up a lot of data. LINK
At first glance, this sounds crazy to a lot of people but the question is whether it is more valuable to you to keep your travel plans secret or to make them widely available as a potential way to add value to your travel. We are already targeted by advertisers for our social behavior and choices made both online and offline, so it’s not especially new, at least in concept, that our personal data could and should be used in this manner.
The larger question is whether or not the whole concept of “privacy” is really just a social concept that is undergoing a major shift. I am sure that the views on privacy from a sixty-year-old are radically different from those of a twelve-year-old.
Last week, a very popular photograph circulated of Megan Fox appearantly ignoring a sweet chubby kid trying to give her a flower:
Kodak then announced that it was offering $5000 to anyone who could identify the boy in the photo.
Earlier today, Gawker recieved an email from a young woman claiming to not only know the identity of the young boy but said she was his friend on Facebook. Eager to confirm this tip, Gawker tried looking up his page but it was set to private. So, what did Gawker do?
Since the young lad’s Facebook profile was set to private and can only be viewed by his “friends,” we asked Kim to send us some screengrabs of his Facebook page as proof, and she obliged. As you can see from the gallery below, which includes a pic of our boy with one of those little Jonas freaks, it looks as though we may have found the victim of Megan Fox’s smoldering disdain, an 11 year-old Brit named Harvii.
Yup, they posted the whole thing online. His whole private collection of photos. All of it.
Now, this is certainly not the first time someone has had their private social media profile published for all the world to see but it is troubling when a major blog, trying to make at least some stab at legitimacy, does it. We all know that nothing on the web is private but does that mean we should all just disregard anyone’s effort to even attempt a modicum of privacy. It’s not like this kid is a legitimate star who’s just asking for attention.
I’d be curious to hear from any lawyers out there if publishing screengrabs of a private Facebook page is in any way a criminal offense.
I love this story about a Fordham Law class in which one assignment was for students to collect all publicly available information on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In a result that was surprising to Scalia but not to those of us familar with the tragic state of “privacy” in the digital age:
Professor Joel Reidenberg and his class now have a 15-page dossier on Scalia, including his home address, the value of his home, his home phone number, the movies he likes, his food preferences, his wife’s personal e-mail address, and “photos of his lovely grandchildren.”
The students did this, in part, as a response to comments made by Justice Scalia in which he seems to say that personal privacy doesn’t need more legal protections. Of course, he’s still not pleased with the students’ findings.
It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be quite irresponsible. That appears in the First Amendment context all the time. What can be said often should not be said. Prof. Reidenberg’s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any.
While it is interesting to see the lines Scalia draws between personal responsibility and legal responsibility there would seem to be plenty of relevant issues raised by this classroom exercise and that those issues deserve more than a petulant reply from Scalia.
How do you feel about the state of your privacy in the digial age?
LINK
Filmmaker Rob Spence is missing an eye so he is in the process of making a fake eye with a tiny video projector installed within it, allowing him, eventually, to record everything he “sees.”
In addition to helping make important strides in the research and development of possible prosthetics for the blind, Spence is hoping to turn his eventual videos into a study on privacy and surveillance.
I was listening to a story about Spence on BBC World Service this morning and the commentators were saying they would hide if they saw Spence coming their way if they knew he was an “EyeBorg.” Of course, what is so silly about hiding from an eyeborg is that we are being recorded by, depending on where you live and what you do, many cameras every day. Take money from an ATM (or just walk past one slowly) and you’ve been taped. Go in or out of almost any major retail store, you’ve been taped.
The notion that it is somehow more invasive for a private citizen to have the same recording capabilities as the government and businesses is kind of “head in the sand” thinking.
It’s interesting how many people reactly with a strong negative response if you take pictures of them in public. It might not be against the law but people feel violated nonetheless. Yet, nobody seems to be upset when they get money from the ATM.
A bunch of Facebook users who clearly have deluded notions of privacy rights are up in arms over a recent change to the “terms of service” that nobody actually bothered to read when they signed up in the first place:
This month, when Facebook updated its terms, it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated. (via)
The notion that you have some right to keeping private that which you have posted on a social network is just plain absurd. Those who desire privacy should not be on social networks, or using the internet at all, really. The days of privacy are pretty much over and have been for a long time.
The NYT has a good article about the pros and cons of massive data mining and the state of our personal privacy.
As a jumping-off point they look at a program being run at M.I.T.
“Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who’s nearby.
Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network. ”
While this is a relatively harmless and completely voluntary invasion of privacy it raises a slew of questions about what constitutes “private” actions and how, in this digital age especially, are we going to balance the technical ability to track and gather personal data with the rights of the individual?
NYT piece is definitely worth a read.
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August 4, 2009 1:11 pm | 
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