The Butt Ugly Weblog

Why privacy?

Yes! This post at iWire explains something that I've been wondering for some time. In the old days, we didn't have to care about privacy - we could just shut our doors or move in the middle of the forest to have privacy or something. But now:

Information networks cut across all sorts of boundaries, mingling politics, social lives, working lives, sex lives and so on. They don't care. Data bases and networks don't form judgements about what should or shouldn't be stored, so we have to take that decision for them, thus creating privacy rights.

This is exactly like what has happened so many times in our history already: technology changes many ways that we thought how the world once behaved, that we need to adapt ourselves, our thinking, and our laws to accommodate that.

New York Times also has an article that has been sending ripples through the blogosphere: "It's like all of my friends are reporters now" that touches the same subject. Especially combined with camera phones, blogs represent a big challenge to our privacy issues. No longer is our privacy threatened by the anonymous big corporations: it will also be threatened by well-meaning (or not), but uninhibited friends equipped with cameras.

Link through Corante.