I remember reading Popular Mechanics when I was a kid. (Maybe it was my brother who read it? I could be misremembering.) Anyway, this article from that venerable (launched in 1902!) magazine has some interesting comments on online privacy.
Here’s one tidbit, including a quotation from Daniel Solove, a leading light in the field of privacy law:
“Cloud-based social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace
push the privacy envelope even further, encouraging users to post and
share massive amounts of personal data that can be scooped up and
stored indefinitely. And in an increasing number of cases,
information that people willingly post about themselves online is
coming back to haunt them. “The problem is that teenagers, college
students and even some adults who ought to know better are not
thinking through the long-term consequences of putting up so much
personal information,” says Daniel Solove, author of The Future of
Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. “Today’s
reality is that once something is out in the public, it usually stays
there.”
and, perhaps a little unusually, an interesting quote from a computer scientist at the US Military Academy on the Milton Friedman “no free lunch” quality of social networking sites and similar pages:
“Free Web services aren’t free,” says Gregory Conti, computer scientist at the U.S. Military Academy. “We pay for them with
micropayments of personal information.”
And then finally a short note from PopMech itself:
None of these technologies ever truly feels like a trap until it’s too late—when your embarrassing photos are posted online by your angry ex, when your cellphone data becomes damning evidence against you in court, or when the ads delivered to your e-mail in box become disturbingly personal.
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