Shrinking Privacy, Rising Transparency

Lately my friends and I seem to fall into two camps – those who don’t see issues with Facebook’s new privacy policies, and those who do.

I am way more freaked out by the privacy issues linked to always-on location services than I am by Google search results. Surveillance, anyone? (But that could be because I don’t understand the tech all that well.)

Everyone has their own lines, their own boundaries, when it comes to being online.

I learned my lessons on what not to say a long time ago, the hard way.

There is the embracing side of me, that sees the web as a unique place to express myself as well as an expression of the global consciousness. A place to share and be shared with. A place to connect. In all reality I have nothing to hide about my life and I understand that most of what I’ve done with or in my life is really easy to find out about online – that’s where the understanding how the web works thing comes into play.

There is a transparency to our lives we don’t control any more. Our data is owned and spliced every day. Our emails indexed, supposedly for the purposes of delivering relevant ads. That’s… kinda scary. The way I look at it is something like this: it’s a karmic thing. The whole world is communicating about private things, every day, using this medium. It’s a mutually assured destruction scenario on a global personal scale. So the lid will likely remain on pretty tight for the foreseeable future – my lifetime, maybe?

For example, public records. You can easily discover that I was married in 1996. You can find that I have no outstanding liens or a criminal record, and maybe you can find out that I’ve gotten two speeding tickets in my lifetime, but you wouldn’t be able to know – because you weren’t there and it happened in my real life and I reserve the stories for cocktail parties – that I have gotten out of 5 or 6 tickets just by being respectful and nice to the officer in question (though others in the car called it “flirting”). So there it is – I’ve told that story – and now it’s out there, forever. But that’s ok. I’m ok with that story.

My rule of thumb online is this – say my kids are going over my digital records all Bridges of Madison County -like one day. And they find a blog posting. Will they fall over dead about my secret life? Or will they say, mom thought about and did some interesting things before and after we came along?

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