Logical Extremes

"Many people overshare, in the sense of being spammy, and in the sense of sharing things that are not in their long-term best interest. This is greatly facilitated by tools that encourage oversharing, made by companies who profit from oversharing.

There's no argument that there are benefits to sharing certain kinds of information in certain kinds of contexts.

But I don't see privacy advocates pushing for everyone to adopt more private norms. Privacy advocates in general mainly want people to have the information and tools to make informed decisions about their sharing, and to have easy ways to preserve their privacy when that is their wish. That includes being able to participate pseudonymously when there is positive value in making the information public but zero or negative value in those users associating that information with their real-world identities (#nymwars).

I find it a bit disingenuous when people (particularly those who profit from their own or others' publicity) try to force their "norms" on those who just want to retain their privacy, when those who value privacy aren't trying to force others not to be more public. So I don't think it's an issue of public versus private. It's more like when is more privacy sensible and when is more publicity sensible, and how do we give people environments and tools to support them in making their own decisions across the full spectrum of behaviors.

And, we need to do a much better job of telling people how their personal and personally-identifying information is going to be used. There's a lot of opaque data collection and aggregation going on that would horrify a lot of people if they knew about it."

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September 15, 2010