Re:Why no one cares about privacy anymore
by tedunangst on Friday March 12, 2010 @12:59PM
(#1187295)
How is insulting your boss on your Facebook wall different from dissing him at a bar then discovering that the bartender is his brother?
Re:Why no one cares about privacy anymore
by loup-vaillant on Monday March 15, 2010 @06:19AM
(#1192609)
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.
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).