Re:Facebook reveals friends list even when it’s set to private
by msg on Saturday November 30, 2013 @03:57AM
(#6822685)
This notion makes sense to me. The more public or quotidian your thoughts and behavior, the greater chance that people will be able to nail you down. And there are interesting feedback loops when you go public, then people expect you to continue to be public in similar situations.
There is an interesting tension between the benefits of collaboration and the benefits of individuality. John Lennon and Paul McCartney playing off each other, or Andrew Wiles working alone in obscurity.
Surprise and disruption are closely linked to privacy in my mind. Not necessarily by launch time. But the groundwork for originality to me is laid in the soil of a rich inner life.
Running off on a tangent, that's a really interesting analogy. I wonder how much could be done with the notion that privacy is the opposite of entropy: that is, privacy is about minimizing the arrangements of how your information is formed, and there's a universal, inevitable trend towards maximizing those arrangements. Differently, privacy as the predictability of how a piece of information moves: as entropy, or publicity, increases the predictability of the information becomes less as its possibility space increases.