Give Up the Fight For Personal Privacy?

KlaymenDK writes "Over the last decade or so, I have strived to maintain my privacy. I have uninstalled Windows, told my friends 'sorry' when they wanted me to join Facebook, had a fight with my brother when he wanted to move the family email hosting to Gmail, and generally held back on my personal information online. But since, amongst all of my friends, I am the only one doing this, it may well be that my battle is lost already. Worse, I'm really putting myself out of the loop, and it is starting to look like self-flagellation. Indeed, it is a common occurrence that my wife or friends will strike up a conversation based on something from their Facebook 'wall' (whatever that is). Becoming ever more unconnected with my friends, live or online, is ultimately harming my social relations. I am seriously considering throwing in the towel and signing up for Gmail, Facebook, the lot. If 'they' have my soul already, I might as well reap the benefits of this newfangled, privacy-less, AJAX-2.0 world. It doesn't really matter if it was me or my friends selling me out. Or does it? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. How many Windows-eschewing users are not also eschewing the social networking services and all the other 2.0 supersites with their dubious end-user license agreements?"

Comments

Your privacy was eroded for you

[beef curtains]

I'm a Windows-eschewing user who has embraced all things Google...Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar (my wife keeps it up to date, which prevents "You didn't tell me we had plans on Friday!" moments). I also have Facebook, Friendster, and LinkedIn profiles.

It's funny, I went out of my way to keep my social networking site profiles generic (no pictures, no personal info, no personal statements, no likes/dislikes, etc.), and only really used them so that, when friends sent me links saying "Dude, check out this chick I work with" or "Look what this guy we went to high school with us up to now", I could see who they were talking about.

But what I found out is that, if you know people who have profiles, and those people own digital cameras, and you've ever appeared in any of their pictures, there is a chance that your privacy has already gone up in smoke. Facebook as a very irritating feature called "tagging"...Jenny, an avid Facebook user, takes a picture of their friends Bob, Susan and Mike. Jenny then uploads that picture to her Facebook profile and "tags" that picture with the names of all the people in it. If any of those people have Facebook profiles, their names in that tag will link to them. So in this case, this picture would be tagged with Bob, Susan and Mike. Congratulations, your face is now on the web, and has a name attached to it. This tagging feature is optional, but I've found that it seems to be quite popular.

So despite my efforts to keep my image & life details to myself, this has been undermined many times over by Facebook fanatics who have tagged pictures of me, and have added "helpful" details about how the picture was taken at my wife's cousin's wedding, complete with dates & locations.

Your privacy is gone, my friend. You might as well suck it up & try to look at the silver lining: it is sorta fun to make contact with old classmates and to laugh at ex-girlfriends who've really let themselves go.

Re:Your privacy was eroded for you

[thomasw_lrd]

That is how I feel about it. Little kids and people who want to be little kids use social networking sites. I'm an adult, and when I want to make plans, discuss something important, or have a party. I just use the phone. I still have all my privacy. And I don't hang out with people who are religious on social sites.

Re:Your privacy was eroded for you

[kelnos]

As far as I'm concerned, social networking sites are a total waste of time that are suited for teenagers.

So basically your entire thesis is "I personally haven't found a use for Facebook, so I declare it to be a useless waste of time suited to a demographic that 'real adults' consider a bunch of immature fools."

Do I even need to point out how stupid that is?

Guess what? Not everyone finds LinkedIn useful. That doesn't make it a waste of time, does it?

Re:Your privacy was eroded for you

[Anonymous Coward]

I encountered the opposite situation that you described:

I was not allowed to join a closed mailing list for malware researchers due to the fact that I am not googleable. Had I spread my identity all over the net, had a personal homepage that accurately described me and my skills, had spread comments on my thoughts to various topics of my interest under my real name on the net etc. I probably would have been accepted. But the mentioned mailing list does not want to empower criminal or dubious individuals with working state-of-the-art malicious code so a good googleable online reputation within the community is very valuable.

Therefore I now am faced with the worry that my next potential employer might do the same. I mean, would you google a prospective employee? I would. And now imagine you had two potential employees, one who made a really good impression but you can not find anything about him on the net and a second guy who made a mediocre or even a good or maybe also a really good impression AND you find lots of positive things on the net about him. Like how people like him, blog entries about his specialization and generally: published advances to his profession like participation on public high profile mailing lists, published articles and write-ups, proof-of-concept code etc.

It is also common in my working field that potential employers initiate a background scan on you. Again: I guess being googleable might be an advantage here.

The only thing that helps me in this regard and that I have now but did not have when I applied for approval to the mentioned malware analysis group are my googleable certifications.

____________________
Mod all ACs as +1 in this thread as insightful comments might easily be written by ACs in this thread due to the topic.

How is this any different from the real world?

[i_ate_god]

So, instead of going to a bar to discuss things where I can overhear them, you lay it all out on your facebook profile instead, where I can overread them.

So what? Who cares if your likes or dislikes are posted for all to see?

I LIKE JUNO REACTOR AND SEX

See? Was that so hard? Has my life become worse now that you know this? Facebook isn't going to make your life any less private than when your girlfriend talks to her girlfriends about your impotence. Stop being so paranoid. This isn't a new world of TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS.

Re:How is this any different from the real world?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, instead of going to a bar to discuss things where I can overhear them, you lay it all out on your facebook profile instead, where I can overread them.

Ten minutes later, you won't remember the bar discussion anymore. Ten years later, the database storing the facebook profile information is still around, and all manner of government agencies and/or advertising companies will be happily querying through it.

Re:How is this any different from the real world?

[kesuki]

this is why i love slashdot. a guy who is worried about privacy, exposed for all to see anyways. you can't do stuff on the net that involves logins and ids, and remain private.

Re:How is this any different from the real world?

[Mex]

Personally, I'm a big fan of his google 3d models! ( http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/search?uq=00954388159546749388 )

I don't get it...

[Otter]

I'm not sure what the motivation is here. Either "privacy" is some sort of religious thing for you, in which case giving up Facebook is a small price to pay, or it's a pragmatic matter, in which case you can make a decision about what the pros and cons are for you instead of asking us.

If you're asking whether I personally am impressed by someone bragging about how he refuses to use Facebook or GMail: it impresses me about as much as someone who brags about not having heard of some television show.

Re:I don't get it...

[Bogtha]

If you're asking whether I personally am impressed by someone bragging about how he refuses to use Facebook or GMail: it impresses me about as much as someone who brags about not having heard of some television show.

In fact, the entire submission reads like a pastiche of Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television. I understand wanting to protect your privacy, but this guy really does seem to treasure the fact that he is clueless about Facebook etc. Whenever I've ever heard anybody say anything like "their Facebook 'wall' (whatever that is), it's always been with a condescending "I'm too good for crap like that" tone. This guy doesn't want privacy, he wants to feel better than everybody else.

Re:Man are you on facebook?

[snowraver1]

Why? Who cares how "hammed" someone got last Wednesday night. Oooh Look at all the pictures. Look at all the losers that I hated in High School. Facebook is for people that want to make High School last forever. I couldn't wait to leave the people I met in High School behind, why go back?

Reverse

[Rinisari]

I'm a privacy guy, too, or at least I was until things like Facebook and blogs come around.

Now, instead of trying to keep everything secret, I think it's easier to assume that everything is known. Some things simply have access controls to modify them or see extended information or are otherwise secured by information that assuredly only I know: passphrases (not passwords).

There's also a key element here: I don't do anything illegal and I'm honest with friends and family. One might say, "What happens when you do?" to which I will reply, "Then I guess I'm going to jail like I should." If someone comes to me with beef about something I wrote, then it's up to me to defend my position.

If I want to pass or store information securely, I'll use PGP or other virtually impenetrable encryption with good secret key protection practices, such as keeping them in my head.

Re:Reverse

[Hyppy]

The "I have nothing to hide" argument has been covered at great length by Daniel Solove (great read, by the way).

How do you know your lawful activities will always be lawful? Every time I see someone react with "I'm not a criminal" fallacy, all I can think of is the question "Are you now, or have you ever been associated with a member of the Muslim faith?" We're not far away from a witch hunt of that flavor.

Even putting aside the threat of zealous elected officials with grocery lists, not all of your private information is fit for public consumption. Taken in the wrong context, almost any information about you can be used against you. Have you paid for a bar tab with a credit card? Through a certain lens, you could be painted as a raging drunk. Sure, there could be hundreds of valid explanations, but chances are you won't be present or able to defend yourself.

I trust the corporations even less. When the only risk that an entity must seriously consider is a possible monetary settlement, then the odds of your best interests being taken seriously are nil. Remember that.

Err..

[TheSpoom]

This is a bit over the top. On Facebook, for example, you can restrict practically any information you put into it. Now, Facebook themselves could technically do what they wanted with it, but if you're worried about the information getting out to the internet as a whole, you just go into your preferences and tell it what to make public, friends-only, completely private, or what-have-you, and they'll restrict it as appropriate. Just because most people don't enable this restriction doesn't mean it's not there.

If you're worried about Facebook selling your information to other entities, etc., take a look at Facebook's privacy policy, which states pretty clearly what they will and will not do with your information.

I have a feeling, though, that you've already made your decision and just want to hear from others who feel as you do.

Resistance is futile

[fiannaFailMan]

For years I swore that I'd never get a cell phone. I held out admirably until about 2003/04 or thereabouts, but I had to succumb. The reason was that everyone else had one, and social etiquette had moved on to the point where it was considered rude not to call in certain situations, not to return a call promptly, and social events were being organised and plans adjusted with such speed that it was all but impossible to be kept in the loop with a landline and payphones alone.

It's similar to how there are people who live in rural or suburban areas who would probably love to be able to live without a car, but a lot of the infrastructure and social norms that would have made that feasible in the past are no longer around.

Society expects you to be able to have personal mobility and instant availability for communication, and it works on the assumption that you do.

Judging by the experience posted, it looks like some people are holding back on the social networking thing and finding it difficult because of peer pressure pushing them into it. Interesting how society forces a body to conform.

Maintain privacy, except on Slashdot

[totallygeek]

So, you don't want anything posted on places like Facebook, showing a list of your friends along with articles you have written, journal entries, ties to items you have posted about, etc. But, you have no problem with the same on Slashdot?

Four friends listed
A page filled with your posts to submitted articles
Three journal entries
Three fans

I know some people on Facebook that maintain some privacy: one never fills in all the fields or puts in erroneous information, one puts her middle name as her last name and posts an avatar instead of a photo.

Re:Man are you on facebook?

[0100010001010011]

Because some of us that hated High School just as much as you did in High School actually managed to make friends in college. It's a great way to keep in touch with people. The "People you may know" has found some long lost friends of mine.

Yes you enter the argument of "If they were that good of friends I would still talk to them". Adult life (marriage, kids, family, work) leaves little time sometimes for other stuff. It's nice to catch up even once a month with a friend.

Oh wait. Nevermind, we all just get wasted and show pictures. I don't have any pictures of kids or sports. My mom (!) isn't on facebook. I don't send her messages now and again. Nope. All drunken photos from Last Wednesday.

Re:If ignoring facebook disconnects you from frien

[Anonymous Coward]

And my experience is the opposite. I guess our anecdotes cancel.

The OP should get over it - Facebook became popular partly because it provides very fine grained privacy controls. I blocked photos of me being visible from my profile some time ago - friends can still tag me but there's no way to find those photos except through brute force search, and you have to be friends with my friends to see those photos.

Also, classifying GMail with Facebook is sort of a red herring, I think. Facebook exists to let you publish personal information. GMail does not. If you keep your email in GMail then chances are excellent you'll be the only one to ever read it. There are a handful of engineers at Google who can read peoples mail and they are busy guys. Having your data read by machines really isn't the same.

What about Windows?

[Wee]

I fail to see what Windows has to do with your mini-rant. As a long-time Linux user, I'll shake my tiny fist along with you and tilt at all the windmills I come across, but how have you given up your privacy by using a certain operating system?

-B

what a drama queen

[circletimessquare]

i consider privacy to include my password to my bank account, what my girlfirend looks like naked, and the details of how i lost my virginity, and a few other things

i don't really consider anything that goes on in gmail, in windows, or on facebook to equate to my privacy. who does? this information is mined in order to display ads in a side panel on my pc? ok. and your point?

if you consider that sort of pointless uninteresting minutae of your life to be in the realm of your "privacy" then i and many other people think you are being rather precious and overly dramatic about your life. its really just not that interesting, or worth protecting. most of us have some ability to gauge exactly how absolutely interesting segments of our daily lives and our social circle is, egomaniacs amongst us notwithstanding, and we find it to be rather common and not valuable. precious in total, to ourselves, because it is our lives, but not inherently precious as some sort of vital aspect of humanity. and we know this. and there is no cognitive dissonance about this observation. only within our own personal perspective does this minutiae have value, and in no other persecptive is it even possible to have value. so there is no need to protect anything

take for example a series of snapshots of a trip to disney world. to the person in those snapshots, they are probably more valuable than the mona lisa. but to most everyone else, they are utterly uninteresting. but, and here's the important part: the person in those snapshots KNOWS they are valuable only to him, such that exposure of those pictures to random people he will never know has no context to his life. it cannot hurt him, their reaction. even if he knew someone was looking at his private pictures and was laughing at them: so what? how can that hurt you? how can it wound you? its completely without relevancy to who and what is important to you, so laugh away. the context in which they laugh has no leverage over your personal life, becuase the judgments being made against you are being made within frameworks that have no impact on how you live your life or how you judge your life, or anyone important to you judges your life

this level of security about one's personal life is not bizarre, its normal. i am aware there are probably brittle insecure people out there who instead would be hurt and wounded by this scenario. and? its not like their reaction is valid. its only their distorted sense of what they attach their ego to that gives them pain. yes, they are in pain, but according to any coherent sense of morality, no valid reason can be formulated that justifies their pain. their reaction has no valid real context to their lives, despite their false impression that it does. their own misplaced sense of perspective is the source of their pain, not anything that anyone has impositioned them with an abridgement of their "privacy"

and this is not even something new to the world of the internet. all of us, thorughout all time periods and cultures, have been exposed to judgments about our personal lives by "outsiders". if i go to japan, and i laugh at what japanese people eat, does that hurt the japanese people's feelings? will it change what they eat? is my laughter valid to them in some way? doe sit have any context in their lives? what if a child laughed at my hairdo? or, if i am a teenager, what if an adult tut tutted at my clothing. has my personal space been judged or hurt in any context that is valid and you would take into consideration in changing your personal life?

its not that people are radically unconcerned about their privacy. its that some people consider things to be "private" and worthy of radical defense that most of us view as completely pointless effluvia. go ahead, make fun of it, expose it to the world. its me, its my personality. and?

"I'm not doing anything illegal"

[maillemaker]

"There's also a key element here: I don't do anything illegal and I'm honest with friends and family. One might say, "What happens when you do?" to which I will reply, "Then I guess I'm going to jail like I should." If someone comes to me with beef about something I wrote, then it's up to me to defend my position."

There is a problem with this position.

You are making the assumption that nothing will happen in the future to make currently acceptable, moral, lawful behavior illegal.

If the law changes in such a way as to be tyrannical and you have allowed no possibility for revolt without getting caught you have sealed your fate long before the tyranny came to pass.

Re:David Brin wrote about this years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

I was hoping someone would mention that.

This whole obsession with privacy is a little hard to understand at times. Personally, I just don't see the point in trying to prevent your name or photo from ever appearing online. True, there have been cases of identity theft using information on Facebook, but it's not worth worrying about if you're careful and limit your profile to just general information.

I don't know. I think the world is super paranoid today. It never bothers me when someone in another country knows my full name. Or when my picture has been uploaded somewhere. Or when Google records the stuff I search for online. Who really cares? There are tens of thousands of users for every employee who has access to that data, and frankly it's a little self-centered to think one of them cares even remotely about what YOU searched for.

Privacy is important for some things, but it's not this magical state that makes you immune to anything ever going wrong in your life again. Keep some things secret, and stop being so damn paranoid about everything else. Yeah, Gmail scans your emails for keywords. So what? Nobody other than a machine is going to read your letters, and even if they did, nobody is going to care that you wrote a saucy message to your girlfriend (or wife, or whatever).

I don't have a Facebook account, because I don't have any use for one. Most of my friends stay in contact via email and chatroom conversations. We have no use for an AJAX site where we can tell everyone what mood we're in and what goth music we're listening to this week. Okay, so maybe I have a personal gripe with most online networking site, as they tend to be populated with attention-whoring kids who think write text on a bright yellow background is perfectly readable. But even when used properly, those sites just don't fill any specific need of my social life.

If you're paranoid about identity theft, don't use your credit card online. Don't post your contact details anywhere, or your SSN (or any equivalent national ID in your country). But really, there's no need to be so absurdly paranoid about your photo, even when captioned by your full name. Nobody cares about you! I'm sorry to be blunt, but really, nobody is going to see your picture and then suddenly decide to pursue more information (unless you happen to be quite a dashing young man).

This world is full of people who are all worried about themselves. We have our own problems, and we probably spend our private time doing all the same things you do. It really, really isn't a big deal if some of your life makes its way onto the digital world. Nobody is going to care about it anyway.

Re:Take the opposite approach.

[mpapet]

I hate to break it to you, but the privacy you strive for is long gone. Even if you go to a cash-only, thriftstore lifestyle, there's still lots of data being collected on you and then resold.

The kind of privacy you are discussing, is the commercial kind. I don't consider it as important as the other stuff.
Just don't do anything meaningful on these social sites and you should be good to go.

I'm going to do exactly as suggested and be sure I'm recorded at multiple places at the same time doing all kinds of dumb things. I'll get knighted by the queen of Applestan and visit the Great Wall after that. I miss San Francisco. I think I'll go there next.
 

Re:David Brin wrote about this years ago

[postbigbang]

You need to understand respect for those that desire privacy. Just because you're an exhibitionist doesn't mean that we are. We can be private in our thoughts, deeds, and actions. Anonymity also insulates you against the whims of government, and organizations that don't have your best interests in mind.

I don't care if anyone knows about me or not; those that do are certainly in touch, and not under the auspices of soul-rendering EULAs from Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, LinkedIn, or any other 'social site'.

Your broadly cast seeming truisms are indeed false, and suit you, and you and others that agree with it. There are many of us that don't. Privacy is part of liberty, and liberty an essential part of freedom. I give up neither just so that others can use a seeming social network to keep in touch with me. There's email, snail mail, and simple phone calls. Oh yeah-- the best one-- face to face visits.

Re:Take the opposite approach.

[Rinisari]

Seriously. When sites and places ask for personal information ("where were you born", "first car", "first person you dated"), use false facts, but simply remember them. I've started doing that now with nonsense answers. If I'm stupid enough forget my password and can't remember the nonsense, I'll call the place or email them. If they don't have something in place beyond that, they don't deserve my time and information.

Re:Man are you on facebook?

[Troy]

Because you can do a little at a time, when you have the time (10 free minutes. Let's see what my college buddy did today)

Because its really not that much work (you make it sound like it takes hours and hours)

Because there is an entire social norm set up around calling people that doesn't necessarily fit into a person's schedule. (why do you think people spend 2 minutes sending a text message that would have taken 20 seconds to call and say). This is doubly true for far-flung friends that you haven't talked to in a while.

Because you can't show someone pictures of your trip to Spain over the phone.

Because reconnecting with lost friends is both fun and difficult. "YAY! I found you. Do we have anything to talk about now, or are we just warm memories from days gone by"

Because of any number of other reasons that make perfect sense to the person doing it. If they don't make sense to you, well, that's completely irrelevant. It's not about you.

I resisted Facebook for a long time. As a high school teacher, my profile is completely private and a religiously de-tag myself on people's albums. I joined it this summer at the urging of a friend, and have really enjoyed being able to reconnect with far-flung friends. It's a poor surrogate for that shared experience that underlays many friendships, but it is better than nothing when someone is several time zones away.

I struggle too

[mcelrath]

I struggle with the same problem. Some time ago I signed up for a facebook account, but declined to approve the "how we know each other" things my friends posted when they added me as a friend -- that crossed a line. Eventually I caved and approved all of them.

Personal privacy is not something that's terribly important until someone uses it against you. Society has to get used to the fact that the boring guy in accounting may actually attend kinky parties, and that's not a reason to fire him. Loss of privacy enables discrimination, and there must be a counterbalancing force to that. The optimistic side of me thinks that this will make society more tolerant. The other side sees that it will cause harm to a lot of people in the short term.

Police and courts must be enabled to the same information (and there's no reason they can't get that info now...). So when the accountant at the kinky sex party is fired, he can sue for discrimination. I do expect a rash of court cases of this type over the next 10 years. Fortunately they should be easy to win.

But I think the most serious consequence is in politics. Or, areas of life where fact is secondary to appearance. I've never felt terribly concerned about any details about myself...just ask and I'm sure I'd give you way more information than you could find in facebook. But, it's the principle of the matter, and the capability of unscrupulous people to do unscrupulous things. Not necessarily to me... but the capability of (say) one political party to prevent another political party from showing up for a vote by putting their names on a terrorist watch list, or by calling a raid on a party they know they attended because it was on Facebook Calendar. This kind of openness enables your enemies just as it enables your friends, and I don't know how to counter this change. It's clear the US anyway has political parties willing to blatantly lie about each other (e.g. Palin - Obama "palling with terrorists"), it's not that important that they have actual facts they can distort for their lies. Without this kind of openness, they would make things up anyway.

So, transparency of information will cause (a) stronger anti-discrimination laws and (b) difficulty for anyone in politics. This could be the end of functional democracy.

I also think the internet should be making people smarter. I'm still waiting on serious data to back that up...it also seems to give idiots a place to congregate.

So in conclusion, I have no conclusion. Things are changing. I don't know yet whether it's good or bad.

I am the same way

[DaMattster]

I don't use windows and I don't use social networking sites and I am proud of that. Keep up the good work! I think privacy is really underrated

privacy != isolation

[lurker4hire]

privacy isn't about keeping secrets, keeping yourself isolated, but instead about having the power to decide who has access to things you would rather keep "private". very few people keep everything private, in fact most humans, social creatures that we are, need to share otherwise private things with trusted friends and family.

there came a point for me when I realized that the benefits of sharing day to day details of my life with my "friends" outweighed my anxiety over sharing them. to share the types of details that tools like fb allow previously required constant, repetitive physical contact (i.e. being in high school), but online i've strengthened valued social bonds that were very tenuous before due to geography or passage of time (and contrary to popular opinion, you can simply reject those who you would have rejected by not associating with before)

if you have balanced social life you will likely find some use for fb etc, in terms that it increases potential social encounters.

however if you are socially insecure in some way you may

a) become overly dependent of online social tools as a means of reassuring yourself that you are socially relevant

or

b) avoid them all like the plague despite the fact that all your friends are organizing their social lives there (thus reducing your opportunities for social contact and feeding a self fulfilling "bah i'm better than them anyways" attitude)

the main problem with most social web tools is that there is a lack of transparency over how they handle your information on the backend (fb for example, sure you can pretty closely control how your friends see your data, but what about all those annoying apps and fb the company itself? how can i know, in detail, what they're gonna do with my info? heck, it's not even crystal clear who has access to what info wrt applications)

l4h

Re:David Brin wrote about this years ago

[Deagol]

My position is that the powerful have more to lose from a breakdown of privacy than the "private" citizen has to fear.

Unfortunately, the evidence thus far seems to contradict what you hope for.

The problem is, those with power have (wait for it...) power. They can act with blatant disregard of the law, but they still have strong influence over those who write, enforce, and interpret the laws. At the very least, they an afford the high cover charge for what passes for justice these days. Sure, we're thrown the occasional bone for the sake of political theater, but that's really all it is.

The current veep weathered the incident of shooting his buddy in the face far better than your typical run-of-the-mill hunter would have. There was a SLC city councilman who, maybe 10 years ago, ditched his car while soused and he got off with a wink and a nod. You think anyone posting/reading Slashdot would have survived the same child porn incident Pete Townshend did with their lives intact?

A transparent society wouldn't level the field, but would make the imbalance of power even worse. Evidence we currently have for the misdeeds of powerful people hardly makes a dent as it is. What makes anyone think that giving *them* more ammunition against the rest of us would accomplish?

Re:David Brin wrote about this years ago

[Dixie_Flatline]

Your comment about identity theft got me thinking:

Is it harder to steal someone's identity when it's well known to be theirs?

I mean, if my picture is on the internet, and everyone knows my full name and basically where I live and what I do for a living, how easy is it for someone to come and steal my identity in a way that I can't refute? Instead of spending years untangling the thread and trying to convince the legal system that *I'm* me, and someone else ISN'T, maybe I can just point to the preponderance of evidence that I am who I say I am.

Is this the same sort of thing that we strive for with using OSS in voting machines? By exposing everything, have we actually tightened security? If my SIN (or SSN) is available on the internet on my facebook page, next to all those pictures of me from the time I was 8 years old to the present, does anyone really have a hope of stealing my identity?

I suppose identity theft normally works by stealing essential bits of your identity and using them from the shadows, but in a system where a bright light is shone on all the little dark spots, would it be possible anymore? Hmm.

(I do, actually, understand the desire for privacy for certain things; the adage that if you don't have anything to hide, you shouldn't worry is retarded. The next time someone asks that of you, ask how many times a week they have sex, or what the results of their last prostate exam was. Just because there's nothing illegal or actually embarrassing about the information doesn't mean that it isn't worth keeping secret.)

And nothing of value was lost

[philspear]

I hate to use a slashdot meme, and I'm not making the argument that just because something has no apperant real ramifications, it's not a serious issue, but what's so bad about pictures of you being online? You already have your images taken hundreds of times a week, anytime you walk past a bank, into almost any store, whenever you use an ATM.

If you're not famous, the only people who are interested in pictures of you on vacation are people you already know. The one real concern I've seen is if someone posts a picture of you drinking and a prospective employer sees it. That is a concern, and a reason to detag a photo of yourself drinking. Of course, it's an extremely stupid employer who is concerned about that type of thing in the first place, and I maintain that you're better off not working there, but I also realize it's unfortunately not always that simple.

I feel like I'm missing something. Is it more than just the principle of your right to privacy and not looking bad to future employers?

Re:And nothing of value was lost

[init100]

This is a major reason I will not vote for Obama. He has associated with questionable characters at times.

Don't all politicians do that?

Re:Take the opposite approach.

[zhrinze]

If you're lucky. What if prospective employers looked at your page?

Re:Take the opposite approach.

[cayenne8]

"Seriously. When sites and places ask for personal information ("where were you born", "first car", "first person you dated"), use false facts, but simply remember them. I've started doing that now with nonsense answers. If I'm stupid enough forget my password and can't remember the nonsense, I'll call the place or email them. If they don't have something in place beyond that, they don't deserve my time and information."

I've been doing that for years....on my grocery store discount cards and other accounts, they think I'm a 68 year old hispanic lady named Matilda Jenkins, who speaks with a lisp, is on welfare and drives a Ferrari.

Make things like this fun...come up with different personas that make no sense whatsoever, I think it is fun to try to really skew their data in strange new ways.

Re:Take the opposite approach.

[Redfeather]

Or the real opposite. My presense on the web is fairly transparent - Facebook, my domain - and because of this and my perspective on involvement, I'm not anonymous, but it is very hard to slander me. This, in my experience, is better than letting my image run unchecked because of my opting out.

Live life as a hermit

[edmicman]

You can either live a secluded life as a hermit, and live life to its fullest by interacting with others. The cruel truth of it is, if you interact with another human then your "privacy" (in your terms) is gone. All the Gmails and Facebooks have done is move it online and cataloged it. Before the Internet, if you walked outside and met a friend at the park, neighbors could see you, other friends might see you, they could take pictures, tell their friends and family about it, etc.

What difference does it make if those acquaintances that see you or whatnot are living on your street, or linked to you online?

Re:Take the opposite approach.

[eltaco]

I think this is the point where we can all agree, as the OP hints at, that the actual problem is the web 2.0 thingy. Not only does the community supply the information, but it also rectifies false entries. Google, to name one big fish, has been doing this for literally years. Search results, that get the most clicks, get linked to the most, appear to have the most information get more face time with the searcher. Another example was their image tagging, which had two users enter tags for images as to classify them. Ultimately it failed, as the scope was too large, which is basically the same reason wikis, for instance, have so much trouble with false entries and misleading information.
Of course obfuscating information, re-obfuscating and basically confusing the hell out of everyone can help, but in time it will kill your credibility and label you a troll.
AS the OP implies, the problem is the whole community, standing as one, dragging each other in by peer pressure. And as long as people get blinded by "pretty" and "necessary" web2.0 sites added with a little "I don't have anything to hide", we're up a certain creek without a certain tool.
In conclusion, I suppose the only effective way to combat these sites is by complaining. Or wait until the users have learned & grown enough to not volunteer all their information to the net. Fat chance though.

Re:Or you could just take legal action

[gstoddart]

I understand your personal preference, but it's worth keeping in mind that Facebook are not immune from data protection rules either. If they are holding personal information about you without your consent, and worse, sharing it with others, then they may well be breaking the law in some jurisdictions.

Is that true, or merely an assertion?

I ask, because if Sue posts a picture she took, to her site, and your face is in it and linked to your profile ... then they are holding the information that Sue gave them (legitimately) and the fact that you're incidentally in it is irrelevant to your personal stuff. Because, it's now her personal stuff as well.

In a wired universe, it can get a little more indirect in terms of if it's "your" information or not.

I'm just not sure most privacy laws would be strong enough to cover this case, and it might come down to a matter of whose informed consent is needed. And, moreover, what is the threshold at which Facebook gets to say they acted in good faith and be absolutely correct about it.

Heck, as an avid photographer, I would say that if I took a photo of a crowd or in public, and you were in it (butt naked, vomiting, and with someone other than your wife) then I just have to say ... don't do things in public you might not want seen or photographed. Posting it to Facebook all nicely tagged with metadata and cross-referenced with your friends ... well, that's just asking for it.

Cheers

Re:Or you could just take legal action

[electrictroy]

Question:

Why should I care if my face appears on some Facebook or Myspace page? It's no different than if I'm in the downtown square, a photographer snaps a photo of the crowd, and slaps the image on the front page of the newspaper. I see no reason to hide myself.

As for other issues like Googlemail, the phone company has already published your name, address, and number in the Yellow Pages. Avoiding google does not stop that information from being "out there" and available.

I think that we, like politicians, can be both public and private. Politicians appear on camera all day long, and yet they have private lives, often sex affairs, which we citizens know nothing about. If they can be both public & private at the same time, so too can we.