I think there's a generational difference in privacy, too. The older generation have learned enough and was passed on enough experience from the previous generations to start with a vague sense of why privacy is useful, and then over the course of their life internalize the reasons why it's actually useful. The current young generation didn't get that taught to them, but they're the same human stock as previous generations. If previous generations found it advantageous to live with it all hanging out, they would have. This generation won't either, except they're going to get to learn a much harder way, without the gentle leadin.
The stories about how this generation doesn't care about privacy have been around for years now and have become common wisdom. The stories about this generation is actually learning the hard way about privacy are few and far between, but by my count, growing rapidly. Stories about groups of young-20-somethings who don't let each other take out their video phones while they are partying, stories like this, they're only going to continue to grow, and grow, and grow.
Humans have not changed. The logic of privacy has not changed. The fact that information about you is power over you has not changed. The only change is one generation thrown to the wolves so quickly and thoroughly that they didn't have time to ease into it safely, and in my opinion the likely end result in five or ten years is a generation more paranoid about privacy than any we've seen in a while, because everyone will have a personal story about how they were socially screwed by the lack of privacy, and not just vague habits picked up by tradition.
re: generational difference in privacy attitudes. The older generations who grew up in small towns or tight-knit neighborhoods gossip(ed) about each other like crazy. Pretty much every aspect of their lives was public knowledge among their friends and associates. (e.g. If you wanted to know where the pretty girls were hanging out - just go out and ask someone.) The sense that there is safety in anonymity may have been something very specific to the suburbia generations (boomers/X).
In the small-town instance, while everyone knew your business, you also generally knew both who every was, and what their business was.
The illusion of social networking is that you're performing in front of a window such that you can see who's viewing you. You're not. You're performing in front of a two-way mirror -- others can see in, but you cannot see out. You can only view their own two-way mirrors.
The telling bit for me is that the companies who are most interested in sucking down personal information, Facebook, but even moreso Google, put extreme controls over outward flows of their data.
Yes, and that's where the desire for privacy comes from. Nobody can gossip about what they don't know (well... to a first approximation, anyhow), and the only way to prevent the gossip mill from passing around some tidbit is to ensure that it is never discovered in the first place.
Privacy is a defense against the gossip mill. Infusing the gossip mill with digital might isn't going to make the desirability of that defense go away.
That's a certain type of privacy, but it seems that most of the concern revolves around employers/creeps/government/etc accessing the information through some backdoor method.
I'm not so sure if most people actually mind if their old high school friends are gossiping about their latest relationship status update. Facebook functions as a personal PR tool to "get out in front" of the gossip. But perhaps you're right and things are changing.
Oh look, the Fully General Political Dismissal With No Actual Argument.
I've never understood the mindset that allows one to label an argument with a particular political label, then dismiss it based on the label you just applied. It seems the very definition of closed-minded, to me. Even on further examination I really don't get what you're getting at... did it become "progressive" dogma that personal privacy is irrelevant sometime in the last five minutes or something? Progressive dogma that we should just roll over and accept that large companies are going to invade our privacy for our gain and it's "socially conservative" to think otherwise?
"Past generations did(n't do) foo for a very long time and it seemed to work out" is a fully general argument against any and all change in society, ranging from Facebook to desegregation to bikinis. "Social conservative" is meant literally as in "opposed to social change", not to refer to any particular political movement. It's not a political statement or a dismissal; at most it identifies a fallacy by pointing out that the same reasoning would justify slavery.
That's not the point I made; I didn't say anything about it "working out". I observed that if people wanted a lower of threshold of privacy in the past, they could have already have had it even without technological intervention. Window blinds were not invented in response to Facebook. It's not about "working out", it's about desires.
Technology changes, but the base stock of humanity doesn't on any usefully observable timespan. (Yet.)
> I observed that if people wanted a lower of threshold of privacy in the past, they could have already have had it
And the point I made is that you can say the same thing about racial desegregation, the abolition of slavery, no-fault divorce, wearing jeans in the office, or the social acceptance of homosexuals.
The stories about how this generation doesn't care about privacy have been around for years now and have become common wisdom. The stories about this generation is actually learning the hard way about privacy are few and far between, but by my count, growing rapidly. Stories about groups of young-20-somethings who don't let each other take out their video phones while they are partying, stories like this, they're only going to continue to grow, and grow, and grow.
Humans have not changed. The logic of privacy has not changed. The fact that information about you is power over you has not changed. The only change is one generation thrown to the wolves so quickly and thoroughly that they didn't have time to ease into it safely, and in my opinion the likely end result in five or ten years is a generation more paranoid about privacy than any we've seen in a while, because everyone will have a personal story about how they were socially screwed by the lack of privacy, and not just vague habits picked up by tradition.