Monday, October 25, 2010

Privacy and the Internet

Courtesy of Flowing Data ...



Is this an overstatement?

1 comment:

lucy said...

Well geez this is the linchpin of this entire class in a way, right? I take issue to making anything this black and white (or orange and green in this case), but it does make a pretty striking point. And to be honest, i would rather teach young generations who are now born into the world of iphones and internet EVERYTHING that this is the way the public realm works- need to know the transparency of the public net community. Not just that which you write publicly but also percieved "private" information. In reality, if its living on the web, a manmade artificial software creation, that means someone human who upkeeps that sector can also see it.

Airing something on the internet means it always has the potential to be screenshot, archived, and preserved in a way no piece of paper or conversation memory ever could. At some level, however minute, if even from the google robots, nothing you put on the internet is truly private. BUT, isn't that the point? This concept doesn't bother me. The entire point of the internet is to create a public web of linked computers, expediting the histrionic tradition of intracommunital communication. Yes, gone is the world of smoke signals and fireside chats where you actually felt the warmth of the burning log, but here is the world of expedited communication with community members across the globe! For me, it's a pragmatic necessity of awareness. The internet is not to blame, we are. The internet doesn't put our private information onto its pages, we type that in. So the risk in using online banking and sending private emails should be transparent, acknowledged, and understood.