on privacy

I saw this BBC news story on TV yesterday reporting on this great hullabaloo at some tech conference in Seattle on how privacy is lost! Literally, according to this correspondent, they were celebrating privacy's death.

He was suggesting this idea that one's character, one's self is permanent and forever burned into the ethos of social networking; that one simply cannot hide or in anyway have a private (personal) life.

I smiled. Perhaps these 'analysts' are in a fog? To think, that one can't hide from the network?

The concept of telling it all online; I've never understood the phenomenon and never bought into it.

When I was a Blogger.com "blog-of-note," in 2002 I got all these messages from readers wanting to hear more; more about my sex-life, my secrets, my dreams. And all I could feel from these queries was sadness. I didn't get my esteem from sharing intimate details and didn't know what they got from reading it, people who were really no more than a binary 1 or a 0.

I have always had a thing for privacy.

I wrote a book years ago, about the Internet. The first Interactive Novel of it's kind. I started the web design company in 1996. But, internet, never were you my slave.