Privacy in context.
In the 20’s we fought prohibition, 50’s and 60’s it was segregation. Today we face a new battle called privacy. I bring this up because in todays Journal-World Sarah Benson wrote an interesting article titled Facebook indiscretions plague users.
In her article she gives two examples of the unintended consequences of social networking. The first outlines how an employer can peer into prospective employees social pasts using current employee accounts. The second explains how a group of students, toasting to the university alcohol policy in the comforts of their dorm, got caught by university officials discovering photos in a users profile.
This is somewhat frightening in a Flickr, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Google, Del.icio.us world. With ease I can pick a person discover last nights party pics, a detailed description of what movies, music, and body type they are, what searches they performed last night and what websites they felt worthy of remembering. This may seem harmless but when aggregated, opinions form, and worse yet form out of context.
I don’t have a problem sharing my photos, bookmarks, and even precious thoughts. I do worry that those who don’t know me well may take them out of context. While privacy is societies hurdle in the coming years I think we as individuals need to be reminded of the importance of context.
Remarks
Jeff Croft http://www.jeffcroft.com/
As someone who posts a lot of party pictures and other personal artifacts online, this is something I think about a lot, myself — particularly where it relates to employment.
For now, I’ve taken the attitude that if someone doesn’t like the fact that I go out and party on the weekends (to the extent it would affect my chances of employment with their company), then I probably don’t want to work for them, anyway. Of course, that’s easy to say while I have a job I like. I hope it doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass someday, if I’m ever unemployed again.
It’s definitely worth thinking about, and I’m very cognizant of this stuff as a father of a girl who is just starting to get really into the Internet. But, for me personally, it boils down to this: I’m not a private person “IRL”, so I don’t see much reason to be private online. I put myself out there, and people can take it or leave it.
Hopefully I’ll never regret it. :)
bk
If the context of your thoughts and photos is worthy of protection, then you probably should not be publishing them in a public forum.
With social networking comes personal responsibility.
Nathan Borror http://www.playgroundblues.com/
It’s kind of interesting because we’re always performing degrees of self censorship in public and real life but when its comes to posting things online or talking over IM we’re more apt to let our guard down.
It’s a medium that we feel protected behind when actually it’s no different than strangers standing behind you at the Target photo counter peering at your photos as you thumb through them.
I personally don’t have much to hide so I don’t really mind but I do worry about not providing enough context. Proves the importance of providing and using meta data.
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