Online sharing: knowledgeable or naive?
An article today in CNN’s “End of Privacy” series states:
“Often, younger users — the so-called ‘digital natives’ who have roamed the Web for as long as they can remember — are less worried than older people about their privacy online.
But it’s not because they don’t care about protecting their information. In many cases, experts say, it’s because they understand how to control it better than older users. To them, it’s easy to pick and choose what to share, how to share it and with whom.”
After a career in high tech with a focus in Internet and security companies, I am pretty amused. 
The article says that only 30% of users of age 18-29 are worried about Internet privacy. Of course, many of these folks MAY not have had real-life employment experience in companies that deal with Internet security and privacy.
The inexperience of such folks is often SHARED by the journalists who write such articles.
And then there is the overconfidence of youth….
CNN quotes a 20-year-old student:
“I don’t really see the big deal in it,” said Adam Britten, 20, a Syracuse University junior currently studying in London. “We know how to operate the system.”
It is hard to operate a system that you don’t understand. (Note added December 22, 2010: Try this with a motorcycle…. ) At age 20, most folks would not be permitted to have occupational positions with enough responsibility to understand the systems. Hubris is alive and well. It appears as though the student quoted BELIEVES that online privacy settings ACTUALLY WORK to protect “private” information.
I don’t.
And I believe that there is plenty of evidence, from Folsom Street to Stuxnet (1, 2, 3) to the Mariposa Botnet (OH! And even messages on “secure networks” published by WikiLeaks…. ), to back me up….
I DO agree with the article’s statement that:
“Most of the social-networking stuff is crap. People want to feel important by constantly updating their sites to tell the world what they had for breakfast, what movie is really, really cool, and if they had diarrhea last night.”
Even so, I think that many people underestimate the value of “crap,” which, when combined with OTHER “crap,” provides a lot of useful information about individuals. (Why have law enforcement groups spent so much time going through the garbage of suspects? ) If nothing else, the superficial postings of some people tell us how superficial they actually ARE!
I share mostly impersonal things, because once information is “out there,” it NEVER goes away. Databases are “forever,” and “data-aging” policies exist so that companies can respond in the negative to subpoenas.
Facial photos can be used to construct facial recognition files, which can then be used for the automated recognition of individuals by ever-proliferating public and private cameras. “Checking in” can provide independent verification of data readily available by cell-phone tracking using GPS and triangulation. The value of “social graphs” to organizations like Facebook, governments, and merchants is pretty obvious, even if very little OTHER personal information is shared. Heck, the importance of such information is obvious even to HP researchers!
(Note added December 15, 2010: Right on cue, “Facial recognition comes to Facebook photo tags.”
Younger folks will have to deal with the systems that are now in place – the systems will not go away. I do not envy these folks, who must grow old in a system that is increasing prying into the personal aspects of their lives. (Note added December 21, 2010: I noticed today that Wikipedia has an article entitled “Mass Surveillance” that discusses topics like the “Surveillance Society” established in the U.K. [where the 20-year-old student above is studying, knowledgeably ] and earlier social experiments by the East German secret police, the Stasi, and the societal distrust engendered. The high cost of surveillance no doubt contributed to the economic collapse of the former East German state.]
Never confuse “ignorance” with “security.”
It is better to KNOW and NOT CARE, than it is to NOT KNOW. That way you can flood the system with low-value “crap” (I won’t say “useless”) and make it harder and more expensive to “sift through” the garbage.
Why not? You’re PAYING for the data storage anyway.
(Note added December 15, 2010: Data mining is big business. Here are some of the major players.)
-Bill at
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