I heard someone on tv recently suggest that there's a generation gap in privacy expectations and that young people have a completely different conception of privacy than old people.
Based on what we hear about Myspace and Facebook that certainly must be true. Just the other day a Wall Street Journal article told us how Facebook network users were getting info on what their "friends" were buying online. Link (subscription).
In November, users of social-networking site Facebook Inc. started seeing updates on what their friends had bought online. Last month, users of a Google Inc. news service began receiving lists of articles their friends and acquaintances had read online. And earlier this month, Sears Holdings Corp. let people type anyone's name, phone number and address on a Web site to learn about their Sears purchases.
All three examples have one thing in common: The companies allowed Web users to access personal information about other people they know -- sometimes without the knowledge of those people.
To see how it works take a look at An Interactive Tour of Facebook's News Feed. (This one should be available to non subscribers.)
But at least there's a way to opt out if someone puts the effort into it.
For those who don't mind there's probably a bit of old fashioned narcissism at play. Youtube lets users share what they watch so that people who think they are trend setters can let others see what they should be watching. The competition to set that trend must be fierce. Someone could probably make an interesting study of that.
But that's all voluntary to some extent. However, government sites put info online that, although it's public information, would have taken much more effort to dig up a few years ago, home ownership and their appraised values, for example.
And here's something that might be very personal to the people involved. The Seattle Fire Department 911 calls are posted online by the city of Seattle. Don't know where those addresses are? No problem, some helpful individual developed Public 911, a program that would read the calls and plot the addresses on Google maps. (These links are courtesy of Les at West Texas TV. Thanks Les.)
I suppose that map might be useful to volunteer fire department members who needed a quick display showing where to go. But the fire department handles emergency medical calls, too. And isn't a person's medical information supposed to be private?
Of course, to get the name of the homeowner a voyeur would have to make several key strokes to look up the address at the King County search site. But maybe that's too much trouble for most people.
And perhaps that's what will save us. The baseline for too-much-trouble has shifted. Surfing the net has become so easy that maybe too-much-trouble is measured in just a few too many key strokes needed to pull up the information.
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