Alas, this (http://www.jasoneiseman.com/blog/?p=210 ) is as close I could get to Aaron's "privacy is not an option" post on walkingpaper, and as I'm not particularly fond of wrestling repeatedly with my browser Task manager, it will have to suffice.
The notion of privacy concession as a coin of the Web 2.0 realm troubles me. The blithe assertion that Web 2.0 users must pay (by relinquishing some privacy) in order to "play" in the world of social sites chills me. I want to believe that participation need not be orchestrated by the basest commercial needs of the site provider/sponsors.
We've seen this crusade before, in textile towns, mining communities, chemical plant environs. Tap into the bounty, live better...just leave a few inalienable rights at the door. After all, they don't spend well at the local Wiggly Piggly.
But why backslide unnecessarily? The environmental movement has demonstrated, in some degree at least, that industry can be molded by human concerns. People, especially those who've lived deep enough to recognize the contours of power and vulnerability, need not bend unquestioningly to efforts of industry to refashion humans. A healthy alternative to the "privacy is not an option" slogan might be "mandatory privacy relinquishment is not an option." Or how about "Reformat networks, not people."
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2 comments:
Good post. But I'm not neccesarily saying that privacy concessions are required to participate in web 2.0.
All I am saying is that digital natives may simply have a concept of privacy which people who did not grow up in the current environment (like myself) can't understand.
There are many privacy options in web 2.0. Blogs can be private, flickr pictures can be private, other services offer privacy, but many people instead choose to share their lives more publicly than we've been used to.
Have you seen this --- A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web at http://opensocialweb.org/2007/09/05/bill-of-rights/.
It states the following ....We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:
Ownership of their own personal information, including:
their own profile data
the list of people they are connected to
the activity stream of content they create;
Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.
Sites supporting these rights shall:
Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service
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