From a great speech by an ethnographer at http://sxsw.com/
In our quest to create a social profile ( linkedin/facebook/twitter) the battle of public and private on the web takes a whole new dimension...
Its a struggle online to mantain the balance PII and PEI...
" If you've spent any time thinking about privacy, you've probably heard of PII - "Personally Identifiable Information." All too often, we assume that when people make PII available publicly that they don't care about privacy. While some folks are deeply concerned about PII, PII isn't the whole privacy story. What many people are concerned about is PEI - "Personally Embarrassing Information."
And why do we want to be more social...
"When people make information available, they make themselves vulnerable. We do this all the time in social settings. We make ourselves vulnerable because we believe that we might have something to gain from it. This is how we build friendships. We also make ourselves vulnerable to machines because we hope that we can gain something from it. Yet, just like we trust people to understand the context in which information is shared, so too do we trust machines. When either our friends or our technology fail to maintain the social context, it feels like a huge privacy FAIL."
However when the platform facebook for example ( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline ) changes under you we have a problem like this...
" I met a teen whose abusive father was recently released from jail. Recognizing that a restraining order would not be enough protection, the teen and her mother moved thousands of miles away. As the teen began making friends in her new school, she begged for a Facebook account. Her mother caved and both the daughter and mother worked to make the account as private as possible; neither of them wanted to face the consequences of being found. In December, when Facebook changed its privacy settings, this teen and her mother didn't realize what the change in privacy settings meant until someone else pointed them out after the fact. Is putting her at-risk an acceptable bi-product of Facebook’s changes?"
So the questions one must always ask are....
"What are you trying to achieve? Who do you think you're talking to? How would you feel if someone else was looking? What if what you said could be misinterpreted? "
I just think anything that is available regarding you online is "public" and expect that in some way it can compromised so use extra discretion....
To read the full speech...
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