Sunday, October 17, 2010

Post-Privacy Humanity? Not on their terms.

So my thoughts on privacy have gone back and forth a lot recently and I've decided one thing for sure:

"Post Privacy" can not be allowed to happen by means of grinning "social media experts" pinning our lives up on their board next to their ads.

Post Privacy is fine in concept, but in practice it needs to be paired with a massive advocacy push to make sure of one thing: that the experts, politicians, lawyers, corporate shills, and robber barons get as little or LESS privacy than any of us. And the problem with the way things are happening now is that it works the opposite way. The above types buy proprietary walled-garden networking solutions that let them have all of their conversations away from prying eyes while the rest of us buy our social networking with the data itself. And with our own personal experiences and our data so pivotal and precious, and with server space and time so cheap, it's a raw deal.

I don't think we can really afford to give our data so willingly in the long run. We need both to be spreading our information peer-to-peer rather than through a hub owned by marketing jackasses, and to be undermining the privacy of those who have any significant amount of power.

Because that should be the tradeoff. Privacy or Power. Nobody should have both. Or neither.

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