[LINK] Reuters: 'Web control replaces privacy'

[Roger Clarke]

[Comments at end]

Web control replaces privacy
Reuters / The Australian IT Section
July 03, 2007
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,21991843-15318,00.html

MOVE over, Paris Hilton. We all have celebrity issues in an age when 
anyone can create an online profile, post confessional videos on 
YouTube and make snarky online comments about other people.

The latest generation of websites - which attract tens of millions of 
users daily to share words, photos and videos about themselves and 
their friends - make a virtue of openness at the expense of 
traditional notions of privacy.

"My grandparents would have had a different attitude about privacy," 
says Jeff Jarvis, a former critic for Britain's TV Guide turned top 
blogger and columnist for the Guardian in London.

Sites such as Facebook, Photobucket and Flickr are enjoying surging 
popularity because they allow people to control their online 
identities in ways that make the danger of revealing too much 
information a constant worry - and all part of the game.

"Within the web realm there is no private self," argues David 
Weinberger, author of a newly published book, Everything Is 
Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.

The danger of such exposure is that it could affect careers when 
students seek jobs in the real world or private citizens seek public 
office.

George W. Bush and Bill Clinton might never have been elected 
president of the US had sites like Google's YouTube or News 
Corporation's MySpace, the world's biggest online meeting places, 
existed to record the events of their younger years.

While policy makers ponder how to bolster online anonymity, social 
network users are more concerned about deciding what to reveal about 
themselves next. Most users of the new self-publishing tools report 
finding a stronger sense of community among friends, family and 
random website visitors who share their interests.

Facebook, a site started by a Harvard University undergraduate to 
help students get to know one another, has exploded in popularity 
among professional users in Britain and the US since the site took 
steps to open up to people of all ages.

It now claims 25 million active users, who enjoy the control Facebook 
gives them over who they let into their network.

Highlighting his own change of thinking on the subject of privacy, 
Jarvis revealed last year in a blog post, titled My cheatin' heart, 
that he was suffering from a medical condition that slowed work on 
his widely read media criticism blog, BuzzMachine 
(www.buzzmachine.com/). Supportive comments, and advice about 
potential treatments, poured in.

"Revealing a little bit of yourself is the only way to make 
connections to other people and that is how the internet works," 
Jarvis says."

Caterina Fake, co-founder of photo sharing site Flickr, says the 
defining moment for her startup was when it decided all photos on the 
site would be public.

Previously, photo sites had assumed users photos should be private, 
unless deliberately published for public consumption.

Mena Trott, who, with her husband, Ben, developed Movable Type, a 
software system for publishing blogs, says control is a better word 
than privacy for defining oneself in different situations on the web.


[A disappointingly superficial piece on the self-publicity mania.  It 
overlooks the facts that fantasy reigns in social networking 
services, much of the data is self-supplied, and everything is 
plausibly deniable if and when it's re-discovered and used.  Does 
anyone actually *believe* my on-line CV??]

[Aside:  what a great pseudonym: "co-founder of ... Flickr, Caterina Fake"]

[Now, how about we think about the genuinely interesting and 
difficult bit, which is the ability of search-engines to collate data 
from far more reliable sources than Facebook ...]


-- 
Roger Clarke                  http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/
			            
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Visiting Professor in Info Science & Eng  Australian National University
Visiting Professor in the eCommerce Program      University of Hong Kong
Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW