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:if the information is personal information

[Reality Master 201]

Yes, but on the other hand, eat a dick.

The great thing about that response is it makes at least twice as much sense as anything you write, and it's far shorter.

Re:And nothing of value was lost

[arminw]

...it's an extremely stupid employer who is concerned about that type of thing in the first place...

Maybe not so stupid. There is an element of truth to the premise' "If I know who you associate with, I know something about who you are". If the job requires integrity and trust, which many jobs do, how a prospective employee behaves is very important.

This is a major reason I will not vote for Obama. He has associated with questionable characters at times. Such associations may well cost someone a job also.