Privacy has its advocates. Jeff Jarvis has made himself an advocate for publicness. In Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way we Work and Live, the original Internet optimist argues that if we become too obsessed with guarding all personal information on the 'Net, we'll miss important opportunities that come with making information available.
It's a refreshing take on a topic often covered by people who feel that the Internet -- and in particular, social networks like Facebook and the vast amount of personal data that flow within them -- threatens to imperil our children and undermine our society. Discussions about Internet privacy often include Orwellian allusions to fear: We're concerned about government surveillance. We don't want targeted cookies to help advertisers track our Internet wanderings. We don't want robbers to know when we're not home. Sure, we want the benefits that come with the information age, but all this data about our lives that is accruing digitally? Creepy.
By contrast, Jarvis approaches these questions with delight. But before he can take down the privacy advocates, he has to offer a definition for the term. That's not as easy as you might think. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has tried to recast the desire for privacy as a desire for control over our digital identities. He argues that people want to share information, but we want to determine who gets to see and use it. Jarvis says this definition is too tidy. Privacy is much messier. We live in relationship with other people, after all. How do we even define what qualifies as our own information? If I share information that implicates you, who gets to control that?
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2011/08/26/internet-privacy-is-it-overrated
No comments:
Post a Comment