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| | | Ready for a second review. | | | The truth of the matter is darker. The claim that privacy is "dead" or "lost" suggests a sort of invasion of our secret places, shadowed eyes peering into our bedrooms, probing mentalists looking into our thoughts themselves. It also suggests that we now have no concept of privacy in our lives. But neither implication is reality. | |
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< | To the contrary, we have not stopped understanding what privacy is, nor have we stopped thinking that some things are private. We retain a sense that there are matters that are ours only to tell, our secrets to hold, our nakedness to conceal. Technology does not peer into our innermost sanctum, it is we who spill our secrets to technology. Technology does not read our minds, we instead confess what we are thinking, why we are thinking it, and to whom we are telling it. We do so in real time. Privacy has not been lost, it has been given away; privacy has not died, we have made it into a fully-living monster. This is the Frankensteinian New Privacy, a horror of our own making. | >
> | To the contrary, we have not stopped understanding what privacy is, nor have we stopped thinking that some things are private. We retain a sense that there are matters that are ours only to tell, our secrets to hold, our nakedness to conceal. Technology does not peer into our innermost sanctum, it is we who spill our secrets to technology. Technology does not read our minds, we instead confess what we are thinking, why we are thinking it, and to whom we are telling it. We do so in real time. Privacy has not been lost, it has been given away; privacy has not died, we have made it into a fully-living monster. This is the Frankensteinian New Privacy, a horror of our own making. | | | The Monster, Made | | | But the New Privacy is not a creature of myth, and sunlight alone will not dispatch it. Further, some welcome the monster's influence; we therefore must not simply dispatch the beast, for to do so would be to deny the villagers freedom of choice and thereby sacrifice part of ourselves. | |
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< | Instead, like anything with potential to do great harm, we must limit the monster's reach. We must require the Privacy's agents to reveal their purposes whenever they seek to deal with us. We must require those disclosures to strike the difficult balance between entirety, brevity, and clarity. We cannot pretend that this balance is easily found. But if we are to both respect the choices of those who would freely deal with the monster and yet accept that those dealings are dangerous to us all, that balance is the only viable option of which I know. And if you insist, fellow traveler, that there are better solutions than I here propose, better ways to escape the thicket that we are now within? | >
> | Instead, like anything with potential to do great harm, we must limit the monster's reach. We must require the Privacy's agents to reveal their purposes whenever they seek to deal with us. We must require those disclosures to strike the difficult balance between entirety, brevity, and clarity. We cannot pretend that this balance is easily found. But if we are to both respect the choices of those who would freely deal with the monster and yet accept that those dealings are dangerous to us all, that balance is the only viable option of which I know. And if you insist, fellow traveler, that there are better solutions than I here propose, better ways to escape the thicket that we are now within? | | | Well, TWikiGuest, then you see why I am so eager to have you along. |
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