Being Outed

I am being outed on a pretty regular basis these days. This morning I had breakfast with Hugh MacLeod and Ben Hammersley (oops now I am doing it) and Hugh Twittered the fact. Like most social-media-active people, I appear occasionally on the Facebook pages of friends and tagged photos turn up every now and then too. So even if I wanted to control my level or type of privacy, I could not entirely. With micro-blogging and social networks this is only going to increase and as it does our idea of privacy and personal space will change. Before we could all record and publish at will, we mostly had separated lives. Home, travel, work, travel, home. Then mobile phones intruded and faxes and email and now I can broadcast pictures of who I am having lunch with as I’m having it (with or without their knowledge or permission). I suspect we all use the privacy settings on different sites in quite specific ways but this is not entirely the point any more. So on one hand you have Facebook and Google giving other companies the ability to systematically target you with ads and make money from your online presence (read their terms and conditions), and on the other hand you have your friends micro-blogging your every move and geo-tagging pictures of you down the pub. This is a significant social disruption. Ben’s view is that the next generation are already figuring out the social mores and etiquette around this in ways we will find bewildering.

Declaration: Edelman works for Microsoft.

[tags] Privacy, Ben Hammersley, Hugh MacLeod [/tags]