On 10/03/2012 01:02, Larry Colen wrote:
It's my feeling that privacy is, for the most part, an anomalous concept in human society nearly unique to our time and culture. For most of human history, most people lived in small villages, or nomadic tribes, generally sharing one room houses (or tents) with their whole family. Basically, if you did something, pretty much everyone in your world knew about it. Yes, it's possible to sneak around, for a little bit. Let's say that google knows that you've been doing searches on third party batteries for the K-5, and for some reason, that information becomes public. How is that going to hurt you? There's a natural tendency to keep everything secret as a default, and losing that privacy can be uncomfortable. But, for most things the only thing that finding them out about you for most people will do is bore them. I realize that I'm a lot more open about some things than most people. One thing that I've learned is that there are a lot of things that aren't considered part of the cultural norm, that are far more common than people think. But since people think that they are so weird, they keep quiet, and so everyone thinks that those interests are far more unusual than they really are. Causing a vicious cycle of insecurity and stigmatization. I'm not saying that privacy is a bad thing, It's just that often the result of people finding out about things that you keep quiet about is you find that far more people have that in common with you than you would ever guess. Culturally, we're seeing an interesting transformation along these lines on subjects such as homosexuality. As it becomes more accepted, more people are out about it, less stigma is attached, more people feel comfortable about coming out, and young people coming to terms with their sexuality are less likely to feel that they are the only person in town that feels that way. We have a couple people on this list that are "out of the closet", and I expect that someone finding out about that aspect of their life is far less traumatic now, than it would have been thirty years ago, and that is a topic that is a lot more personal than what brand of detergent you tend to buy. I suspect also that the view of privacy on the net might be a lot different between those of us that have dealt with the workings of the net, and the web, for 20 years and the less technical people who might view it as a slightly more interactive form of television. I used to run my webserver out of my house. It was entertaining for me to have a scrolling window that showed me what pages were being looked at on my website, and what IP addresses they were coming from. I had met someone online and we had plans to meet in person for lunch. I knew what field she worked in (lets say she was a legal secretary, it could have been realty, or venture capitol), and I saw some hits from a domain that was in that same industry. I commented that I saw some hits on my website from Peter's law office and fish market (or whatever it was), was that by any chance her? She freaked out. She thought that I was some sort of freaky uber high tech stalker, broke our date, and I never heard from he
r again. This disconnect quite likely comes from people not knowing just how much information is out there about them, and how much they tell about themselves without even realizing it.
We are definitely going through a transitional period. It's going to be very interesting to see how culture changes when the people who grew up with broadband internet access are old enough to be the ones in positions of power. People who had daily conversations with friends all over the world, long before they were forty years old. People that by the time they were forty, already had twenty five years of pictures of things that seemed like a good idea at the time (out with friends and possibly after several drinks) posted on the web.
Concurrent to the privacy issue there has been a growth in the concept of intellectual property rights, which I believe is also what drives some peoples' objections to data harvesting. The "it's data about me, so it must be mine" argument. The balance between that idea and the contracts (written or not) that people agree to when interacting with stuff like internet content has yet to, and may never, be reached.
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