As bidden, I surveyed the librarianblog searchroll for privacy, and was interested in the remark on the Shifted Librarian’s blog that Boomers are worried about privacy while the Net Gen wants to be found and seen. I am reminded of how celebrities used to manage their public persona carefully while keeping their private life private (how many people knew that Rock Hudson was gay?) but today’s celebrities can’t pick their noses without seeing it published within minutes. The Shifted Librarian also said that the Net Gen isn’t worried about privacy because they don’t understand the issues yet. I certainly see a fair amount of naivete among some of my younger library users. Would concerns about privacy also be related to when people come of age politically? The Viet Nam War generation may be suspicious and distrustful of Big Brother and the motives of the “military industrial complex” or the “international conglomerates” or whoever else might acquire our personal information for reasons not in our best interestes. The Net Gen is hearing all about how we need information to track terrorists and the risks of not picking up and connecting bits of information such as who is learning to fly planes can determine whether thousands die and tall buildings are reduced to rubble.
As a librarian, I used to deal exclusively in public/published information while private/proprietary information was generally out of my reach. Now all kinds of previously private information is public, if one only knows where to look, and my ability to access that information depends more on my technical skills than on legal or financial barriers. David Brin argued that if information is not private it must be public to everyone. If no one can see the security/traffic cams but police, we can have a police state with abuses of our privacy but if everyone can watch through a these cameras from a web site, everyone has equal access to the information.
I remember hearing that there was a study by Congress in the late 80s or early 90s into the growing backlog of classified government documents awaiting declassification. It was learned that the level of one’s security clearance was an indicator of one’s clout, and power is currency in DC. Consequently, a great many documents were needlessly classified so that people with clearance to read them had an advantage over people who didn’t have clearance. Congress classified the study, until they were shamed into releasing it. Today, the current administration tries to suppress and distort government information for political reasons, but the information leaks out and is published anyway. A recent example of this is the CDC report on the effects of climate change on worldwide disease and injury.
So, I love the ability to get more information and the inability of certain interests to successfully suppress information that should be public, but I am dismayed that everything I search on the web or everything I buy or everything I do while walking down the street can become part of a potentially published repository that other people can access without my knowledge, much less consent. And I wish I could believe that once the Net Gen realizes that their whole lives are being lived in a fishbowl and that has consequences it would inspire better behavior, but the jury is still out on that topic.
Well, this will be my final post for the Web 2.0 class. I may try the optional task later, but I have run out of time. I hope the course will remain up on the web for a while, because I would like to revisit some of the lessons when I have more time. The past two months I had so many other commitments, deadlines, and other classes (Intro to Molecular Biology databases was especially challenging for me) that I didn’t have enough time to play with these apps, think about all the readings, and generally reflect on what I had learned. Nevertheless, I did learn by working through the readings and exercises. This was a good course. Thanks!
Tags: privacy
