Dr. Poor: Are you suggesting with your comment above that there's a sense of maturation in online identity management? If so, I couldn't agree with you more. With your "realization" idea (which you hesitated to introduce :) I think you're hitting the nail on the head. It's not that more information about users is being revealed it's simply the format of the information (all volunteered by users). I really sense that the initial anger was misplaced and should have been redirected by each protestor at themselves in a "silly me" reaction to the sudden realization of just how much they'd revealed about themselves. I'm encouraging my students to reflect on their reactions to the Facebook Fiasco (as we're jokingly calling it) to learn more about their own online identity management and assumptions of privacy. Sarah "Intellagirl Robbins On 9/10/06, Nathaniel Poor <natpoor@umich.edu> wrote:
I think the two go together very well, and danah's quote is really nice.
Facebookers gave up their privacy, in the info-org view, when they made their accounts and posted whatever info they did and when they even do actions on Facebook (since webservers keep records of actions)
but as users they probably (I haven't asked) weren't thinking about it very much -- their *experience* was that they could do all these things on the web and no one they knew really knew what they were doing (so, maybe Amazon would show them their recently viewed products, but only to the user, and does Amazon look at that on the individual level? -- that's rhetorical)
so privacy was their previous experience, but not the actual state of the data perhaps "realization" or "exposure" have a place here, but I don't want to introduce more vocabulary
ndp...
On Sep 10, 2006, at 8:05 AM, Charles Ess wrote:
I don't want to take away from the importance of the comments below - but on their occasion, simply comment: in the fields of information and computer ethics (ICE), one of the most important theoretical approaches these days is authored by a chap at Oxford named Luciano Floridi. His information ontology is a radical re- visioning of traditional metaphysics and ontology, so as to make "information" the basic unit of reality. On this view, further, you _are_ your information (Floridi has recently denoted human beings as "inforgs" - (connected) informational organisms.
On this view, privacy is very much a matter of a state of data. Generally, as computer ethicist James Moor famously (at least within ICE) noted, electronic means of communication, and most especially the internet, "grease" information, making it far easier to transmit, collect, redistribute, etc. Within this framework, privacy is a matter of "informational friction" - slowing down / stopping specific information from leaking beyond specified boundaries.
I'm _not_ trying to suggest an either/or here between privacy as data and privacy as user experience - but rather to say that it would be really interesting to combine these two views ...
so many projects, so little time... Thanks, everyone, for your comments on this thread - invaluable! - c.
danah has articulated something enormously important:
"Privacy is an experience that people have, not a state of data."
This has strong implications for the ways we design technologies for privacy. If privacy is a user experience issue, then the process for design should be organized accordingly and cannot be accomplished without the involvement of actual participants in the community who will use that technology. If privacy is a data issue, then a completely different set of heuristics apply.
thank you, danah!
Andrea
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------------------------------- Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D. Professor, Retired http://www.umich.edu/~natpoor
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