Your Data is Not Remarkable

Perhaps you have seen the thoughtful work of David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect. In Kirkpatrick’s NPR interview, he really demonstrated a deep understanding of the social, political and technological intersections of social media and eloquently summed up why (I think) internet privacy is a very thin debate. Kirkpatrick said:

“As the quantity of data about us grows, the fact that any given piece of data about us might be exposed in the world probably becomes less problematic over time because similar data is increasingly being exposed about everyone else we know – therefore it’s less remarkable.”

In short, by virtue of its mass adoption, Facebook is the telephone book of 2010+. So I pose the questions: Will the rate of abuse on Facebook be greater than that of the White Pages? Greater than what is already available about each of us through Equifax or Experian?

Believing that a conventional use of Facebook is a risk to civil liberties is akin to the self-aggrandizing performance of each perfectly crafted Tweet or Status Update that we put up about ourselves. (C’mon, I know you spent a good 10-15 minutes on that one about the last episode of Lost…)

Ironically, if we’re worried about privacy, we should all post more Status Updates, join more Groups, download more Applications. Because as Kirkpatrick mentioned during the interview, there is a “certain anonymity in obscurity.”

1 Comment

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