danah boyd has a terrific essay on Facebook and privacy. Now I understand what the big deal was.

Here is danah’s summary:

* Privacy is an experience that people have, not a state of data.

* The ickyness that people feel when they panic about privacy comes from the experience of exposure or invasion.

* We’ve experienced the exposure hiccup before with Cobot. When are we going to learn?

* Invasion changes social reality and there is a cognitive cap to being able to handle it.

* Does invasion potentially result in a weakening of meaningful social ties?

* Facebook lost its innocence this week.

And here’s a snippet from the article that makes what I think is a crucial point for the privacy debate:

In the tech world, we have a bad tendency to view the concept of “private” as a single bit that is either 0 or 1. Either it’s exposed or not…

Privacy is not simply about the state of an inanimate object or set of bytes; it is about the sense of vulnerability that an individual experiences. When people feel exposed or invaded, there’s a privacy issue.

Now go read the whole thing. It will be on the test. [Tags: privacy : facebook danah_boyd]

Categories: Uncategorized dw