Why no one cares about privacy anymore
news.cnet.com
news.cnet.com
The way I see it this article’s points fall into two categories.
The first is using alarmists as examples and pretending no one else is concerned about privacy. Yes, the folks who thought Google Street View was an invasion of privacy were a little extreme but they certainly don’t represent the only people who are concerned about keeping things private.
The second thing this article does is to obscure the point with restrictive surveys. Yes, teens generally don’t care about their privacy because they don’t have professional reputations to up hold or jobs to lose. It’s when you start building a life for yourself that you realize how tragic it would be to lose your lifestyle because you said something stupid on Facebook. So using teens as your only data point is misleading.
In the end this is a Google propaganda piece IMHO. Google benefits from things being public because the more public stuff that’s out there the more ads they can sell. It’s hard to make money off a private profile that’s only visible to someone’s immediate friends and family.
(On that note, what's CNet thinking having a reporter who is married to a company employee cover that company?)
To be fair, McCullagh isn't writing this piece as propaganda for Google. He has strong, pre-existing, libertarian/pro-corporate beliefs, including the one that government privacy regulations are right up there with genocide and mandatory abortions for everyone. He has never written an article where he saw benefit in "privacy", nor will he ever.
So, yes, he's distorting the picture and propagandizing about the death of privacy. But he's doing it to push his own beliefs, and not Google's.
Personally, I don't like analogies very much. I go for a more direct approach:
Google: "If I am doing nothing wrong, then I have nothing to hide",
Privacy advocate: "if I am doing nothing wrong, then you have nothing to see".
"Innocent until proven guilty" isn't meant to protect the guilty, it's meant to protect the innocent.
I used the word "steal" for that concept because it was the only word that sprang to mind. I'm happy to reword it if you think of something else.
But does that mean we only care about the privacy of good people? Or do we justify breaching the privacy of good people in order to "protect" them from the information bad people might have?
For me, I'll give up a lot of my privacy if it means less savory characters are stopped from doing bad things. But it's a fine line, and it can be crossed when so much of my privacy is given up that it becomes dangerous to me because of the usefulness or sensitivity of the information divulged.
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The death of privacy is quickly being carried out by the age of false privacy. It's the age of not knowing who is hearing what or even know how much you are sharing; but more so, it's the age of cover-up, where you buy privacy by putting forth a salted self. Those immersed in social media are getting increasingly apt at concealing the bad and accentuating the good. Personal blogging is usually nothing more than an exercise in deception. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't want to know your dirty secrets.
Someone taking a picture of your street and putting it on the internet doesn't violate your privacy. Someone making use of information that you volunteered to a social networking site doesn't violate your privacy, either. Online advertising relates to privacy in only the most extreme of cases - where somehow spyware is installed on your computer that records what software you use and how you use it. Tracking cookies do not violate your privacy.
If you legitimately have something to hide, you won't be found out by online advertising, facebook or even google. There is very little online that can gather information about you that you don't volunteer in some way. Can anyone think of a case where someone's life was significantly impacted by the exposure of private information online?
And I'm only talking about information I explicitly put there. I didn't talk about what could be inferred from that, which can be quite a lot. Even more so when this information is centralized so it can be compared to the other users'.
> Can anyone think of a case where someone's life was significantly impacted by the exposure of private information online?
To convince you, I feel I would have to point to a case where someone's live was suddenly impacted. It does happen, but the main impact is probably more subtle, like discriminations (which you can't see) or advertising (which can do a better job influencing you).
The real differences lies in the understanding of the risks. The "brother bartender" is something most can understand. We all understand that talking in public areas carries a risk of being overheard, and we tune our speech accordingly. However, we don't all understand the risks associated with Facebook and many other services "in the cloud". This means a higher risk of being careless (and hurt yourself in the process).
Until we understand privacy risks associated with internet services as well as those associated with physical interaction, we will have unexpected problems. I'm confident that people will learn anyway. I just hope they don't learn the hard way.
People "volunteer" information about themselves online without intending to or without being aware of what they are revealing (or what Facebook et al will do with it) and what is or is not considered an invasion of privacy is a largely arbitrary social construct. That is why these are real issues, and the answers are not as trivially obvious as you seem to think.
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No, it lacks logic, it's not really fair, and it does stoop to their level. But damn, it sure does feel good in the short term, and frankly, puts them on the defensive.