Archive for the ‘privacy’ tag
Blown to bits
Perhaps the most thorough discussion of the changes to privacy created by today’s Internet is carried out by Abelson, H. et al. (2008), Blown to Bits, Addison-Wesley. This book is written by three MIT and Harvard professors, one of them (Hal Abelson) a co-founder of the Creative Commons initiative.
Its subtitle is Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion. One of its most provocative chapter titles is Naked in the Sunlight: Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned.
Next time you do a search on Google, you may want to think just how much information you are revealing about yourself. As you are probably likely also logged into Google Mail at the same time, Google already has a pretty good picture of you. It’s a trade-off we face (see What the Web Knows About You). Can we live without search engines? Probably not. Social media sites are not that different in that light