What is privacy?
Society seems to have lost the concept somewhat. You see, MC has a confession: in his real life he has no
Facebook page. Nor anything on
MySpace. Never been on
Bebo. Never used
LinkedIn. He has, initially accidentally but more recently purposefully, ensured that there is no
interweb super highway footprint of his life.
Why, I hear you ask? Well, I’m not on the run for major crimes. Nor am I living a bigamous life. I just like my privacy. I don’t want to have images of me out there floating around in cyberspace for every forgotten friend to find. For every past enemy to pore over. For every client to view. For every competitor to twist. I just want to be left alone. I like anonymity.
But I appear to be in the minority these days. Every picture of one’s drunkenness is posted on one’s personal page. Every car accident, holiday photo, all new births, ‘fun times’ etc are issued for anyone and everyone to view. Sort of like placing a camera in your living room, switching it on and then letting anyone tune in.
When I challenge my younger friends/relations on this voluntary surrender of their privacy they say: “Oh I don’t
MySpace anymore – so last year – and on
Facebook you have to be my friend to view me.” Er, no actually. I had to just once be your friend to capture some of your life and save it and then it’s no longer controlled by you it’s controlled by me.
Anyhow, the term friend is somewhat suspect. One of my younger relations – a young man about town, shall we say – has about 8 zillion
Facebook friends anyway. How does he know what all of them will always do with his past?
Yesterday, a
teenager was reported to have lost her job because she moaned on the
internet that her job was boring. My own company indeed did not offer a job to someone wanting to become a PA with us because as soon as she got home from the interview she blabbed about it on her
MySpace page. How could we trust someone with sensitive information if she was happy to download her day onto the
internet? (As standard procedure now, we check all prospective staff’s
internet footprint to see what they say about themselves etc. Big Brother? No, just sensible precaution).
It is an intriguing concept that we now so easily and readily give away our personal details. It is changing the nature of our society. Most probably for the worse.
In a landmark decision yesterday, the Courts refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of the NightJack blog (see the story here). In April, the Blogger was awarded the Orwell Prize for political writing, but since the Times went after him, to find out who he was, the blog is now no more (see here). This is a sad day for the blogosphere. There will be ramifications for sure.
