Wow. I don’t claim to know specifically where the line between “journalism” and “propaganda piece” lies but I think this article crosses it.

The way I see it this article’s points fall into two categories.

The first is using alarmists as examples and pretending no one else is concerned about privacy. Yes, the folks who thought Google Street View was an invasion of privacy were a little extreme but they certainly don’t represent the only people who are concerned about keeping things private.

The second thing this article does is to obscure the point with restrictive surveys. Yes, teens generally don’t care about their privacy because they don’t have professional reputations to up hold or jobs to lose. It’s when you start building a life for yourself that you realize how tragic it would be to lose your lifestyle because you said something stupid on Facebook. So using teens as your only data point is misleading.

In the end this is a Google propaganda piece IMHO. Google benefits from things being public because the more public stuff that’s out there the more ads they can sell. It’s hard to make money off a private profile that’s only visible to someone’s immediate friends and family.

(On that note, what's CNet thinking having a reporter who is married to a company employee cover that company?)

It seems Declan has come a long way from the days when he actually added new content to Politech. (http://www.politechbot.com)

I knew this would be a Declan McCullagh article before I clicked through.

To be fair, McCullagh isn't writing this piece as propaganda for Google. He has strong, pre-existing, libertarian/pro-corporate beliefs, including the one that government privacy regulations are right up there with genocide and mandatory abortions for everyone. He has never written an article where he saw benefit in "privacy", nor will he ever.

So, yes, he's distorting the picture and propagandizing about the death of privacy. But he's doing it to push his own beliefs, and not Google's.

Voluntary transparency is good for reputation and good for business. However, I choose not to live in a glass house. To those who demand to know what I'm trying to hide, I demand to know what they're trying to steal.

trying to steal? what? edit: my point is that telling the people you're trying to convince that they are somehow stealing, is not helping our cause.

This is an analogy to physical possessions. "Steal" translate to "disclose", here.

Personally, I don't like analogies very much. I go for a more direct approach:

Google: "If I am doing nothing wrong, then I have nothing to hide",

Privacy advocate: "if I am doing nothing wrong, then you have nothing to see".

Privacy advocate is closer to "If you don't suspect me of something, you have no reason to be looking".

"Innocent until proven guilty" isn't meant to protect the guilty, it's meant to protect the innocent.

That's exactly what I was saying. Out of context, the phrasing I have chosen may not be the best one, but it matches the phrasing of the sentence it responds to. I think it has more impact in a live debate.

I don't trust any individual who insists on observing everything I say or do. It is very likely that such an individual aims to control my life or property by threat of force.

I used the word "steal" for that concept because it was the only word that sprang to mind. I'm happy to reword it if you think of something else.

I know I'm greatly generalizing here, but when it comes to privacy there are two types of people: good people with legitimate things to hide and bad people with bad things to hide. Knowledge is everything. If I know the government is logging my chats and I'm in the "good people" category, I'll try not to say anything I don't want public and at the same time hope they are catching the "bad people" by logging their chats too.

But does that mean we only care about the privacy of good people? Or do we justify breaching the privacy of good people in order to "protect" them from the information bad people might have?

For me, I'll give up a lot of my privacy if it means less savory characters are stopped from doing bad things. But it's a fine line, and it can be crossed when so much of my privacy is given up that it becomes dangerous to me because of the usefulness or sensitivity of the information divulged.

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The death of privacy is quickly being carried out by the age of false privacy. It's the age of not knowing who is hearing what or even know how much you are sharing; but more so, it's the age of cover-up, where you buy privacy by putting forth a salted self. Those immersed in social media are getting increasingly apt at concealing the bad and accentuating the good. Personal blogging is usually nothing more than an exercise in deception. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't want to know your dirty secrets.

Besides yourself, who is good?

for what it's worth i just gave up on gmail over privacy. i've returned to mutt via ssh. i realise that's probably too old-school for most, but i've been making notes if anyone want to do the same. http://www.acooke.org/cute/LeavingGMa0.html is the first post with the general setup (in particular, using mairix to replace gmail's tags and search) and http://www.acooke.org/cute/EfficientS0.html goes into detail about how to get spam levels down to the same low level as gmail (ie practically none).

I understand that there isn't a commonly accepted term for "I'm creeped out by how much information about me is available", but we need to stop using "privacy". If we keep throwing the word around it will lose all meaning.

Someone taking a picture of your street and putting it on the internet doesn't violate your privacy. Someone making use of information that you volunteered to a social networking site doesn't violate your privacy, either. Online advertising relates to privacy in only the most extreme of cases - where somehow spyware is installed on your computer that records what software you use and how you use it. Tracking cookies do not violate your privacy.

If you legitimately have something to hide, you won't be found out by online advertising, facebook or even google. There is very little online that can gather information about you that you don't volunteer in some way. Can anyone think of a case where someone's life was significantly impacted by the exposure of private information online?

The big problem lies in "volunteering". People mostly don't volunteer. They just don't understand. Writing something on my web site or here, is volunteering. It is public and I know it. Insulting my boss in my Facebook wall, imagining that only my friends will know it, then getting fired over that is not volunteering. It's lacking a clue.

And I'm only talking about information I explicitly put there. I didn't talk about what could be inferred from that, which can be quite a lot. Even more so when this information is centralized so it can be compared to the other users'.

> Can anyone think of a case where someone's life was significantly impacted by the exposure of private information online?

To convince you, I feel I would have to point to a case where someone's live was suddenly impacted. It does happen, but the main impact is probably more subtle, like discriminations (which you can't see) or advertising (which can do a better job influencing you).

How is insulting your boss on your Facebook wall different from dissing him at a bar then discovering that the bartender is his brother?

It's not really different. In both cases, if you knew your boss could've known, you wouldn't have said it. In both cases, you were in trouble because your talk was not as private as you thought it was.

The real differences lies in the understanding of the risks. The "brother bartender" is something most can understand. We all understand that talking in public areas carries a risk of being overheard, and we tune our speech accordingly. However, we don't all understand the risks associated with Facebook and many other services "in the cloud". This means a higher risk of being careless (and hurt yourself in the process).

Until we understand privacy risks associated with internet services as well as those associated with physical interaction, we will have unexpected problems. I'm confident that people will learn anyway. I just hope they don't learn the hard way.

Why is the software you use on your own computer a matter of privacy, while the sites you visit, Web applications you use, and amount of time you spend on them, is not? Before you say "because there is a Web site involved", consider that Microsoft could just as easily have the OS report on what applications you use (or even what emails you write), to better serve you ads, or for any other reason. Your "spyware" comment implies that you would object to this, yet you do not seem to have any objection to companies that deliver applications online doing what amounts to the same thing.

People "volunteer" information about themselves online without intending to or without being aware of what they are revealing (or what Facebook et al will do with it) and what is or is not considered an invasion of privacy is a largely arbitrary social construct. That is why these are real issues, and the answers are not as trivially obvious as you seem to think.

i'd be interested in what the HN community thinks of my current co / hack that's trying to deal 100% with this issue. use "SXEDCRF310" for your invite..

and that would be: http://wwww.getabine.com :)

"If the government doesn't value the privacy of criminals, and the government is invading your privacy, then they must think you're a criminal. And if the government thinks your a criminal, who am I to argue?"

No, it lacks logic, it's not really fair, and it does stoop to their level. But damn, it sure does feel good in the short term, and frankly, puts them on the defensive.