It seems to me that with the
advent of all our social media applications – Facebook, MySpace, twitter,
Flickr, Tumblr etc., the ability for us to get our thoughts out there is the
easiest it’s ever been. The detail that this provides to people is remarkable.
Ad companies use it for focused advertising, other companies use it for various
nefarious means and criminals use it to steal our identities. Less insidious I
think is that people can know us in a way they never have before. The cost to
our privacy seems to be one we’re happy to bear though – the most popular
consumer mobile devices have Facebook and the like built in and integrated with
everything – messages, photos, GPS locations etc. Our internal thoughts and
feelings are now able to externalised quickly and limitlessly. Nine times out
of ten this is incredibly boring stuff (let’s face it, we’re not as interesting
as we’d like to be), but the fodder for bullies, abuse and misuse is
extraordinary. It’s very much like posting a sticky note to the wall at school
with your latest thoughts and opening yourself up to complete, uncontrolled
scrutiny. We all know how much impact putting yourself out there at school can
have. Now we do it on a global scale and it doesn’t seem to be an important
thing to consider the value of our private lives.
Never mind the fact that once
something gets to the Net it never seems to leave. Those embarrassing moments,
which once passed leaving only an uncomfortable memory, now linger – sometimes
that moment makes it to Youtube and it can live forever. These little moments,
of often excruciating embarrassment now have the potential to harm us forever.
One can make injunction to have them removed, a costly and time consuming
procedure which often brings even more attention to the moment and so is only a
partial remedy. It doesn’t stop people from downloading and keeping these
images and movies for ever on their own personal machines. This is even
exploited as people do stupid things for attention (and get it). The slapstick
comedy of the Three Stooges seems to have morphed into Jackass and our
collective intelligence has taken a mighty hit. But back to privacy.
I see the youth of today posting
details, photos and information about themselves that as a young person I would
never have done (and as an old person am even less likely). The generation
older than mine are so recalcitrant about their personal feelings and life it
can be like pulling teeth getting any information out of them even under the
best and most appropriate of circumstances. It certainly adds to their mystery
– another underrated and mostly lost commodity in the world. Whether it’s the
endless tweets of a person summing up their thoughts in 160 characters or their
barely there clothing, mystery is a lost art. Privacy and mystery are
inextricably linked, and we don’t seem to realise that as you give up one, you
give up the other. Potential partners or even potential employers can look into
what you are doing, often without appropriate context, and make judgements on
you and your behaviour without having other critical information, for while we
do tend to post a lot of information to the net, most of it requires a certain
amount of local knowledge (i.e. you had to be there type thing)
It is incumbent upon IT
professionals to help non-technical people navigate this quagmire of what to
do. The privacy settings of Facebook (for example) are not clear cut and there
have been many times I’ve seen a profile completely exposed to all and sundry –
birthdate, address, phone etc. – everything the budding identify thief needs to
acquire and then sell your identity with. We need to help people understand what
they can and should share to the world. There is a vulnerability to such
openness and most lay people don’t understand the potential for harm. IT
professionals have an obligation therefore to protect people from their
potential loss through education and technical assistance. If you consider your
current visibility on the Internet – where are you vulnerable?
