Facebook's Zuckerberg Says Forget Privacy
I've been struggling with this topic since I saw an article on /. yesterday. I'm using the same title as to associate my response directly with the topic. This morning, I started a discussion with several friends in a private forum, and the following is a subset of my opinions on the topic.
I saw this yesterday, and became really angry after reading it. How can someone say that my privacy doesn't matter? After thinking about it overnight, I realized that he's right...
It's at this point where you, the reader, either become more angry that I'm agreeing, or you start to generate thoughts equivalent to the one that you'll be reading below.
Here's why I think ol' Mark is right.
Information about you has always been public; your name, number, address have always been part of the public record. Your achievements, and successes have always been made available for the public eye to review in local and regional newspapers. Whether we liked it or not, information about you and I has always been accessible to anyone.
With the proliferation of the Internet, your 'public record' is now easier to access. An individual doesn't have to walk into town halls anymore to find out about you. They can bring up their favorite browser, from the comfort of their own living rooms, and run a simple search on your name to find out all they would ever want to know.
The reason I quoted public record in the previous paragraph is because now, your public record not only contains information about you as a real world citizen, but as a virtual citizen. Any information about you that has ever made it onto a drive platter somewhere is now considered public.
Right now, you're thinking, well, if I protect my identity through access controls, then only the people that I trust have access to this data. That's all fine and dandy, but what if something you don't want people to know is out there. The chances of the public finding it are much greater because there's less available 'public' knowledge of you to cover it up.
Yesterday, I started looking into and researching the improvement of personal branding, after reading the /. article. Then I thought about other cases where a tactic like this comes in handy; the deliberate task of hiding in plain sight. The first case [other than the job roles of PR people] that came to my mind was Steganography. For those that don't know, [borrowed from the wiki entry] it is the art and science of hiding messages in plain sight [in short].
How can you hide your true self in plain sight, so that the average person won't be able to find you? The reason I state the 'average person' instead of everyone, is because you will never be able to hide from everyone. In comparison, there is always a risk that a cryptographic algorithm can be broken. Nothing can be protected indefinitely, but by producing and distributing content, you can slow the process. During WWII, both the Japanese and the Americans sent false messages in the air, to slow the decryption process by the other party down. The same tactic can apply to your personal identity.
To conclude, I believe that Mark is right in stating that privacy does not exist. However, I'll go one step further, and say that it never existed, it was just easier to protect because of how difficult it was to uncover.
Do your opinions match to those of my own? Do you disagree that privacy never existed? The question that followed as a response to this was... Who cares? Who cares about those of us that aren't celebrities, politicians, or the like? Why does this matter to the average person?
My reply is below.
You would be surprised at how many people out there are concerned with their 'privacy'.
Anyone who has a virtual image that is drastically different from their real world persona is concerned of what information is available about them on the wire; maybe not for us, but there are folks out there that live drastically different lives at home than who they present themselves at work.
For example, Thomas A. Anderson? I know. Fictional character. One of many reasons why the Matrix was so popular was because people could identity with Neo. They felt the same in that they were living one life 'for show', and another for themselves.
Why do these people care? Because they don't want their 'real' persona revealed for fear of being chastised by their peers at their place of employment, and/or even worse, by their family and friends.
Your retort in this case may be, well, that person should find new friends and/or a new job. Easier said than done. Lives become incredibly intertwined to the point at which extricating one's self from it, is more painful than it is by living with it.
I believe the reason people are more afraid now than they were before of being revealed is because of the publicity of information. In the past, people could lead two lives with one side being completely oblivious to the other; today, because of the wire, the information that draws parallels to both sides is much easier to find.
The question now becomes, what are you hiding?
I saw this yesterday, and became really angry after reading it. How can someone say that my privacy doesn't matter? After thinking about it overnight, I realized that he's right...
It's at this point where you, the reader, either become more angry that I'm agreeing, or you start to generate thoughts equivalent to the one that you'll be reading below.
Here's why I think ol' Mark is right.
Information about you has always been public; your name, number, address have always been part of the public record. Your achievements, and successes have always been made available for the public eye to review in local and regional newspapers. Whether we liked it or not, information about you and I has always been accessible to anyone.
With the proliferation of the Internet, your 'public record' is now easier to access. An individual doesn't have to walk into town halls anymore to find out about you. They can bring up their favorite browser, from the comfort of their own living rooms, and run a simple search on your name to find out all they would ever want to know.
The reason I quoted public record in the previous paragraph is because now, your public record not only contains information about you as a real world citizen, but as a virtual citizen. Any information about you that has ever made it onto a drive platter somewhere is now considered public.
Right now, you're thinking, well, if I protect my identity through access controls, then only the people that I trust have access to this data. That's all fine and dandy, but what if something you don't want people to know is out there. The chances of the public finding it are much greater because there's less available 'public' knowledge of you to cover it up.
Yesterday, I started looking into and researching the improvement of personal branding, after reading the /. article. Then I thought about other cases where a tactic like this comes in handy; the deliberate task of hiding in plain sight. The first case [other than the job roles of PR people] that came to my mind was Steganography. For those that don't know, [borrowed from the wiki entry] it is the art and science of hiding messages in plain sight [in short].
How can you hide your true self in plain sight, so that the average person won't be able to find you? The reason I state the 'average person' instead of everyone, is because you will never be able to hide from everyone. In comparison, there is always a risk that a cryptographic algorithm can be broken. Nothing can be protected indefinitely, but by producing and distributing content, you can slow the process. During WWII, both the Japanese and the Americans sent false messages in the air, to slow the decryption process by the other party down. The same tactic can apply to your personal identity.
To conclude, I believe that Mark is right in stating that privacy does not exist. However, I'll go one step further, and say that it never existed, it was just easier to protect because of how difficult it was to uncover.
Do your opinions match to those of my own? Do you disagree that privacy never existed? The question that followed as a response to this was... Who cares? Who cares about those of us that aren't celebrities, politicians, or the like? Why does this matter to the average person?
My reply is below.
You would be surprised at how many people out there are concerned with their 'privacy'.
Anyone who has a virtual image that is drastically different from their real world persona is concerned of what information is available about them on the wire; maybe not for us, but there are folks out there that live drastically different lives at home than who they present themselves at work.
For example, Thomas A. Anderson? I know. Fictional character. One of many reasons why the Matrix was so popular was because people could identity with Neo. They felt the same in that they were living one life 'for show', and another for themselves.
Why do these people care? Because they don't want their 'real' persona revealed for fear of being chastised by their peers at their place of employment, and/or even worse, by their family and friends.
Your retort in this case may be, well, that person should find new friends and/or a new job. Easier said than done. Lives become incredibly intertwined to the point at which extricating one's self from it, is more painful than it is by living with it.
I believe the reason people are more afraid now than they were before of being revealed is because of the publicity of information. In the past, people could lead two lives with one side being completely oblivious to the other; today, because of the wire, the information that draws parallels to both sides is much easier to find.
The question now becomes, what are you hiding?