As a follow-up to my post on the
death of personal privacy earlier this year ... I finally found it again. The link I mentioned in a footnote. The really brilliant essay that summed it all up.
Quoting myself from three years ago, when I had the foresight to link it, albeit from
a friends-locked post:
Danny O'Brien wrote a
brilliant blog entry (
(
Read more... )
Comments 5
Actually using the private and secret registers, I would argue, isn't essential to a healthy life of the mind - but their availability is essential.
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The annoying thing is that a little more flexibility would go a long way in solving this. You can try to emulate the private register by using some combination of the public and secret, and fiddling with the sideband formats a bit; throw in a little extra software and you can probably get a good chunk of it back. (Most of the death of the private register seems to be in electronic communication forms.)
But I suspect people won't, even if someone manages to figure out a reasonable set of protocols for it. The social protocol side seems to be largely controlled by the ignorant, apathetic, and fearful, and/or by mass effects that mysteriously moot/mute deliberate action on that part. The software protocol side is incomprehensible to most of the population, and many of the rest either have an interest in making privacy and/or secrecy go away or else staunchly don't care about it, which comes out almost as bad in the end.
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On the other end, there are are situations that blur the distinction between public and private. A university class is (for some subjects) public at the start of a semester or quarter, and private by the end of it. I feel like my own entries (all but one non-locked) work the same way: knowledge of context is both needed and provided.
I imagine you can still argue the problem without relying on a sharp distinction, though.
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Given how much personal information people tend to share these days, it is no wonder to me that some people no longer have any idea of what private/secret means; where the boundaries are; where the boundaries of other people are. They've lost touch with it, to some degree.
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Look at political discussions today, and for every serious policy discussion you'll find three kerfluffles over what amounts to ill-spirited gossip; people attacking politicians for a haircut or the size of their lawn or a moment of accidental candor. And I hardly need to get started over what passes for entertainment news. Politicians and celebrities, of course, live their lives completely in the public register. If they're any sort of harbinger, I really don't like where this is going.
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