A few selected readers have received an ultra-personalised cover on their issue of Wired this month. "We wanted to see how much personal data we could easily find about them from publicly available sources -- as a means of emphasising some of the points made in our cover story on "what the end of privacy means for you".
And the amount of information that is available from legitimate sources is very alarming (the choice of Andy Coulson as the example cover star is perhaps too ironic) , but most worrying is the amount of information we are now voluntarily and carelessly sharing with the world - if often unwittingly. In his cerebral essay for Wired, Sharing Is A Trap, Andrew Keen paints a dark Orwellian picture, not of the distant future, but of the present.
Both articles are worth a read, and then sign in to facebook and see how many of your privacy settings are set to 'friends of friends'... do you really want to be sharing that widely and randomly? This is not an ill-informed scare-story, but a well thought out meditation on the inevitable stripping away of our privacy; layer by layer. To quote from Keen's article 'Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the smiling utilitarian at the heart of this social darkness, has even come up with his own law to imagine the future of the trap he is laying for us all. "I would expect that next year people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and the next year they will be sharing twice as much as they did before," Zuckerberg's Law states.' And as he has publicly acknowledged elsewhere, 'privacy is dead'.
Having successfully navigated a month without beer, I am seriously considering a month without Facebook....just to see who I miss...and who misses me. And because I don't like the idea that the likes of Zuckerberg are arbitrarily farming my social life to build fantastic wealth - or to build anything else. I doubt that they have my best interests at heart.
(click on the image to see the details)
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