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

Re:Take the opposite approach.

[hbush]

> it's like saying writing your password on a post-it stuck to your monitor is a good security practice because security by obscurity doesn't work.

However writing _incorrect_ password on a post-it note stuck to your monitor works quite well :)

Re:Or you could just take legal action

[dangitman]

I almost wish a few people who still value privacy would start filing formal complaints with the appropriate courts/regulatory authorities, so social networking sites get the message that they only get to collect data with people's informed consent.

That just brings us right back to the questions posted in this writeup. Taking legal action is just going to alienate your Facebook using friends even more.

What I find the most ironic, is that in the earlyish days of the web (and before that, USENET), I was an active participant in online communities. For that, I would often be labeled as an anti-social dork. But today, I'm labeled an anti-social dork because I don't participate in most online communities. Sigh.