"there's enormous advantage for users in giving up some privacy online" #wymhm

The world is changing. We give up more and more of our privacy online in exchange for undoubted benefits. We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone; we give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points; we give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. As medical records go online, we'll increase both the potential and the risks of having private information used and misused.

We need to engage deeply with these changes, and we best do that in the open, with some high profile mis-steps to guide us. In an odd way, Facebook is doing us a favor by bringing these issues to the fore, especially if (as they have done in the past), they react by learning from their mistakes. It's important to remember that there was a privacy brouhaha when Facebook first introduced the Newsfeed back in 2006!

What we're really trying to figure out are the right tradeoffs.

2 responses
To what extent did we "give up" that privacy, and to what extent was it simply taken from us?
In using online communicative technologies like Facebook and Twitter, can we only "give up" privacy? I think so. Much the point of social media involves doing just that. I don't know if it could exist otherwise.