http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/23/cory-doctorow-my-bright-idea
Cory Doctorow is promoting his latest novel, which apparently deals with teenagers and privacy. He makes some interesting points, which will chime with anyone who (like me) knows far more than they'd like about the private lives of their younger relatives thanks to facebook. Thanks facebook.
"Kids' relationship with privacy is really confused; they're told by teachers and adults that their privacy is paramount, that they should stop disclosing so much information on Facebook and so on. And then they go to schools where everything they do is monitored; there's mandatory spyware that takes every click they make, every word they utter and sends it back to teachers and headmasters for disciplinary purposes.
When they go out in public, they're photographed every five minutes and there are signs that prohibit taking any affirmative step to hide themselves from scrutiny or maintain any privacy."
Wow. It really sucks being a kid, doesn't it? Mind you, I recently found my name, address and email are publicly available on the internet. No wonder I get so much spam. Really should do something about that.
7 comments:
I don't buy the argument there's some new or additional conflict.
Privacy isn't paramount - you never really keep everything out of the spotlight - but you need to learn whom to trust. And what signs "prohibit taking any affirmative step to hide themselves from scrutiny or maintain any privacy"? That sounds downright 1984ish.
I recently spoke about this to a colleague who has two young daughters.
He lectured them about online safety in forums and websites, but missed the obvious fact that his (and therefore their) address details were available via a simple "whois" for the domain name he'd created for his family.
Well, sure, but the key is: anything shared is no longer a secret. Your phone is no good unless you give out the number. What is your recourse when you get an unwanted phone call?
My point is, it's not just an "Internet Age" thing, the Internet just throws your voice farther.
There have been signs in shopping centres (at least when I was living in the UK) that prohibited people from wearing baseball caps and the hoods of their jackets. I believe it had something to do with groups of people going out and getting up to mischief while using a hood and cap to conceal their identities from CCTV cameras.
Well, okay, so are we just looking at a phenomenon we've just noticed and calling it new, when it was there all along? Adults and kids have always had a slightly hypocritical relationship, I don't think that will ever change - there'll always be an element of "do as I say, not as I do". And granted, the Media Age (which overlaps with the Internet Age and all the other Ages we're living in) has made us far more wary of threats like paedophiles and mass murderers who were probably always there but didn't have the media coverage. But we have to be much more wary of our hypocrisy now, because it's taking place in a much more open environment where it can more easily be exposed and used against us. Maybe we need to be much more aware of what privacy really is - like in absinthe's example, maybe we need to be less chary of giving out our address (I mean, hell, it's just a house like any other - we all live in houses, like, wow) and more wary about letting people know what sort of people we are - it's okay for them to know where we live as long as we don't give them a reason to be interested in us, sort of thing.
I dunno. I'm thinking aloud here.
We already tell kids "Don't talk to strangers". We need to add "Set your Facebook privacy settings so only people you know can see what you're up to."
I wouldn't necessarily post my street address for anyone to see, but my address is a matter of public record and available on the Internet (in the form of deed records from when I bought the house). Since everybody's address is on the Internet, I'm no less anonymous than if my address weren't available. In other words, it's up to me to make the association between my online personna and my physical one.
There are people here on Multiply who have my physical address and could choose to post it publicly, but (as I mentioned previously) I give out my e-mail address and phone number to people all the time with the tacit understanding they won't scratch them into a truck stop bathroom stall. It hasn't happened yet, but for me it would be more an inconvenience than a threat. It's a little different for kids, but that's why we teach them.
The thing is that there's no one way to go about teaching kids how to protect themselves online. If you block the kids access to social networking sites, parents get accused of not preparing their kids for the real world, if you trust your kids to do the right thing and make sure they know why they should avoid talking to people they don't know, parents get accused of not doing enough to protect their kids.
Trying to teach people the difference between information that is harmless ("today Steve and I went to the park") to information that could potentially have actual consequences to how others perceive them (such as racial slurs, compromising photos, etc) is particularly difficult. At the time it's published, kids have a tough time distinguishing whether those pics of them at the beach could open them to harassment, or if it's just a photograph of a fun day.
Then again, the only privacy problems I've ever encountered was where people I don't know very well obtained my contact information and started giving me unwelcome amounts of attention online and via sms. Even then they simply obtained my contact details through a few friends of mine.
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