IP Democracy: The Futility Of Internet Privacy?

Complicated by social networks. Via Cynthia Brumfield's post at AllThingsDigital:

In the wake of the flap involving Facebook's Beacon program, which circulates information about a user's online purchases from third-party retailers to relevant Facebook friends, Internet privacy is coming under ever-increasing scrutiny. One discouraging conclusion from a panel of privacy experts at today's State of the Net conference is that it's almost impossible to keep putatively private data out of sight on the Internet.

...

That's all well and good, UC Berkeley's Danah Boyd said, but true transparency in a social context is rare because your friends have data about you that they may in turn share with others. "You don't necessarily have a good idea of how you've been 'outed' by the people around you," she said.

Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly defended Facebook's efforts to protect privacy saying that society in general makes it inherently difficult to keep things private. "We've always erred on the side of giving you control, not perfect control, because that doesn't exist in the real world."

IP Democracy Forum

Comments

[mike selissen]

Some UVA undergrads are taking a look at the exposure of private user data to third-party applications through Facebook's platform API and devising an approach to limiting it.

See: www.cs.virginia.edu/felt/privacy

[Sepp Hasslberger]

Anyone on the net, writing a blog, participating in one or more social networks, sending emails to friends, is progressively losing control of what's considered "personal" data. Emails are being monitored, phone traffic is open to surveillance. Privacy has become a hollow word, an illusion.

As the experts say, "it's almost impossible" to keep one's private data out of view.

Why not make of necessity a virtue by

1) recognizing that we have lost privacy or are in an irreversible trend of losing it

2) demanding openness of those who do the surveilling, i.e. demanding that government be open and accessible.

If we can't have privacy, why should government agencies have it?

[Buy Online Rx]

My suspicion is that, if we invested more in such clever translation (adaptation, cohabitation, whatever) we'd be better off and better adapted to diversity and non-comformity.