Let's talk about Privacy

Anyone else remember these PSAs? I used to scoff at them when I was young. OBVIOUSLY don't post things online that you don't want other people to see, it seemed so clear to me that I laughed at people who didn't get it. Well, the PSA is still stupid, mostly because it focuses on pictures. But let's expand the horizon a bit. We no longer live in an impermanent age. You know the old saying "you can't take back what you say"? Even more relevant. This is no longer about just images that can be saved off the screen and then reposted, text now applies as well. For example, Dilbert creator Scott Adams posted on his blog an entry that was fairly anti-feminist and offended a lot of people. Within hours of realizing this was probably an awful idea, he had deleted it, but it was too late: dozens, if not hundreds of sites had already grabbed the post and reposted it, and even more took it from those sites and reposted it in a chain reaction that was unstoppable. This all happened some time last year, but I can still do a quick google search and find his exact words.

That's....that's pretty scary. Another example, some of you may or may not know, but every twitter post is archived by the Library of Congress. That's right. That tweet you just sent out? Going to be saved for all time. I actually understand why they're doing it, it's going to be a treasure trove of sociological information on our generation and the trends we followed for future generations to analyze, but it's still creepy and unsettling to think about. I even remember someone from our reader writing a quick article about Google+ automatically sharing all of his Picasa photos, some of which he most certainly did not want shared.

Privacy? You're so cute, Facebook user.
-The Facebook Staff

And let's not forget the most important offender of this ongoing trend: Facebook. Because, honestly, Facebook doesn't give a flying fuck about your privacy. Oh, where do I start? Well, one day, my girlfriend showed me the wonderful thing known as A Very Potter Musical (and the subsequent A Very Potter Sequel). Being the creepy bastard that I am, I then proceeded to look up Joe Walker, the actor for Voldemort, on Facebook. I found him too, and sent him a friend request, mostly just for shits and giggles. He never did add me, sad day :(

But I still got to read his status updates. Because on Facebook, if you just ignore a friend request, that person can still see your stuff. I guess that means I better just outright decline then, right? Next time you get a friend request, look at the button next to "accept". It doesn't say "decline", it says "ignore". Hitting this button doesn't get rid of the request, it merely hides it from you, allowing that person you didn't want to be friends with to creep all over your statuses.

Facebook is uncomfortably open when you first create an account (the new Timeline profiles are not going to make it any less so). You can go in and change your privacy settings, but, not to be rude, there are a lot of really dumb people out there who can't figure this stuff out. And even if you do, from what I hear, companies and schools can override your privacy settings and get at your profile anyway.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that we're all doomed and nothing will ever be private again. The government will soon start monitoring our thoughts and things are going to get 1984 on us.

No I'm not. That's not the point at all. I'm not sure what my point is, other than the concepts of privacy are changing in our digital world, and we need to learn to adapt and figure out how to keep the things that we don't want others to know, to ourselves.