Alex Halavais notes that his students seem fairly uninterested in protecting their privacy in the face of increasing threats and alludes to an argument often made by technological determinists: “Maybe privacy was just a social artifact of the mass society of the twentieth century”. The question I would ask is if societal norms move in a direction you think is dangerous shouldn’t you act even if the process is voluntary and at the end of the process society will believe itself to be just as happy? I think a lot of technologists are giving up too soon and saying that computers make spreading data around so easy that it must eventually get everywhere (’information wants to be free’).

The fact is that like any other social phenomenon, the draining away of our privacy is at least in part under our own control. If you think (as I do sometimes) that we are strolling blindly into a scary self-imposed “omni-opticon” society then you can try to organize people to become better aware of the dangers (as Alex is indeed doing) and/or you can get governments to take action (and indeed in Europe our privacy is better protected than it is in the US - at least from media and commercial prying).

P.S. By coincidence MSNBC is doing a special online series on privacy (from an American perspective) this week.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Politics, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.