Privacy and the Internet

I woke up this morning thinking that I should write a post on privacy, having read Fred’s post and danah boyd’s two posts over the weekend and Charlie’s post this morning.  Then I realized, I should probably check what I have written about privacy here before, since it seems to be a recurring topic.  So I re-read my own post from March of 2009 and concluded that my thinking hasn’t changed enough since to warrant a new post.  The key quote is this:

I believe what we are seeing is the transition from society trying to impose its existing structures and norms on technology, to technology reshaping society.

I grew up in a relatively small village in Germany.  We had a saying there which went “God sees everything, the community sees more” and captured the idea that it was hard to have secrets in a small place where neighbors talk to each other.  But you could always move to the next small village.

With the Internet you can’t move.  What’s out there about you is out there for everyone to read or see.  There is no way that this won’t deeply change our notion of privacy.

There is a quote I have been using a lot lately, because I believe it perfectly reflects our collective confusion about what is going on with the Internet and society: “As humans we overestimate the rate of change, but underestimate the degree of change” (btw, I would love to find the correct attribution for this).  Overestimating the rate of change gave us the Internet bubble, underestimating the degree of change is giving us confusion over privacy.