Over the next few months, Wired magazine is running the 'Your Life Torn Open' essay series in which issues surrounding privacy will be debated in depth.
In the first essay, published this month, Andrew Keen offers an erudite argument as to why the willingness of individuals to surrender their privacy is tantamount to sacrifice a fundamental part of our humanity.
"Every so often, when I'm in Amsterdam, I visit the Rijksmuseum to remind myself about the history of privacy. I go there to gaze at a picture called The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, which was painted by Jan Vermeer in 1663. It is of an unidentified Dutch woman avidly reading a letter. Vermeer's picture, to borrow a phrase from privacy advocates Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, is a celebration of the "sacred precincts of private and domestic life". It's as if the artist had kept his distance in order to capture the young woman, cocooned in her private world, at her least socially visible.
"Today, as social media continues radically to transform how we communicate and interact, I can't help thinking with a heavy heart about The Woman in Blue. You see, in the networking age of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, the social invisibility that Vermeer so memorably captured is, to excuse the pun, disappearing. That's because, as every Silicon Valley notable, from Eric Schmidt to Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly acknowledged, privacy is dead: a casualty of the cult of the social. Everything and everyone on the internet is becoming collaborative. The future is, in a word, social"
You can read the extended essay here
Unfortunately Ereic Schmidt has gone frome his job as CEO of Google taking his privacy policy with him. Eric's view of privacy: It's our aim to go as close to creepy as we can without crossing the line.
Now if Eric does not understand that Google crossed the line into creepy a long time ago we must surmise that a lot of very weird - and not weird in an amusing way - people are cyberstalking us
I never got round to writing my anaysis of how creepy Google are but Facebook are ahead of them and many others not far behind. And not many people know how easy it is to cover one's tracks online.
Or have we created such a dysfunctional society in the past few decades people are happy to expose their private moments in order to be 'part of' something?
Posted by: Ian R Thorpe | 18/02/2011 at 08:13 PM