A small collection of reasons why not...
Firstly, private content used to be ephemeral and untraceable, but that's no longer the case. Clay Shirky on privacy in the modern age:
It used to be that the principal guarantees of a conversation being private were that no one was listening and it wasn't being preserved for posterity. Now you'd have to take active steps to hide yourself from the authorities and such steps are suspicious-making.
Secondly, we all use sites that claim rights over our stuff. mashable reports about Facebook's changed Terms of Service in Facebook: All Your Stuff is Ours, Even if You Quit:
Sure, you can choose not to use Facebook at all, but that doesn't mean a thing. Someone can still take your photo, slap it on Facebook, and now neither you nor the author of the photo can stop Facebook from using the photo in whichever way they please.Looking at it globally, millions of people are uploading bits of information on everyone and everything, to a huge online database, and by doing so they're automatically giving away the rights to use or modify this information to a private corporation. And not only that; they now also waiver the right to ever take it back from it.
Finally, anti-terrorism laws provide an excuse for the government to change the rules. A random example, UK e-mail law 'attack on rights':
Rules forcing internet companies to keep details of every e-mail sent in the UK are a waste of money and an attack on civil liberties, say critics.From March all internet service providers (ISPs) will by law have to keep information about every e-mail sent or received in the UK for a year.
Human rights group Liberty says it is worried what will happen next.
The Home Office insists the data, which does not include e-mails' content, is vital for crime and terror inquiries.
(And this quote from Clay Shirky just tickled me - it's obvious when you think about it: "I removed "cyberspace" from my vernacular. The idea, which I grew up with, of going into a place separate from the real world, is something my students just don't recognise".)
From The Age, Living in a climate of fear:
While state authorities focus on crucial investigations into arson, emergency advice, town planning and tree clearing, looming over all these is what role human-induced climate change is playing in Australia's weather patterns.And, critically, how much of the country will become more at risk from bushfire because of climate change?
Victorian Premier John Brumby bluntly acknowledged this week that climate change cannot be ignored in future debate over the bushfires.
"There is clear evidence now that the climate is becoming more extreme," Mr Brumby told The 7.30 Report. Announcing a royal commission into Australia's worst natural disaster, he insisted it would look at all aspects of the events. "I want everything on the table."
In related news, for some reason I'm really tickled by the idea that 'global warming' has had a rebrand to 'climate change'. It makes sense, but it still seems odd that concepts like rebranding can apply to huge phenomenon in the real world.
Facebook have possibly finally figured out how they're going to make money. Selling ads doesn't work cos no-one clicks on them. Advertising via the actions of members caused a big privacy ruckus (rightly), so this is their new thing: Networking site cashes in on friends
Facebook is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150m members by creating one of the world's largest market research databases.In an attempt to finally monetise the social networking site, once valued at $15bn (£10.4bn), it will soon allow multinational companies to selectively target its members in order to research the appeal of new products. Companies will be able to pose questions to specially selected members based on such intimate details as whether they are single or married and even whether they are gay or straight.
The company, which has struggled to make money from advertising, has been demonstrating the benefits of its new instant polling tool to some of the most influential business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Interesting piece in the Guardian that handily totally justifies my reading the Sunday Times 'to see what the outside world thinks':
The faintly depressing human tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us is known in social science as "homophily", and it shapes our views, and our lives, in ways we're barely aware of....
We long to have our opinions confirmed, not challenged, and thus, as the Harvard media researcher Ethan Zuckerman puts it, "Homophily causes ignorance." (It also makes us more extreme, studies show: a group of conservatives, given the chance to discuss politics among themselves, will grow more conservative.)...
Technology, Zuckerman argues, risks making things worse: on the internet, most obviously, it's possible to exist almost entirely within a feedback loop shaped by your own preferences. For all its faults, the era when everyone watched the same news bulletin at least exposed people to information they hadn't been looking for. When you Google for something, by contrast, you're imposing the severest of filters, right from the start, on what you'll permit into your field of attention. On sites such as Amazon and iTunes, homophily is a selling point: it's the basis for "collaborative filtering", whereby you're recommended books and music on the basis of what others who made the same purchase - people like you - also enjoyed.
The unspoken assumption here is that you know what you like - that satisfying your existing preferences, and maybe expanding them a little around the edges, is the path to fulfilment. But if happiness research has taught us anything, it's that we're terrible at predicting what will bring us pleasure. Might we end up happier by exposing ourselves more often to serendipity, or even, specifically, to the people and things we don't think we'd like?
From the interweb: Improving Aphrodite
See this? It's not just the supermodels on the cover of Cosmo, it's not just Oprah, it's not just Kira Knightly or whatever her name is, being stretched and elongated on her movie posters. Oh, no! Even Botticelli's Venus and the Thorvaldsen Aphrodite are "too fat" and not bobble-headed enough to sell in today's market. They've been Slim-fasted and Photoshopped (or had ribs removed) because in someone's opinion, even neo-classic art lovers who would be looking to decorate their homes with reproductions of their favorite pieces would not want to look at such chubby women as artists like Botticelli chose, as models.Can you BELIEVE this? The catalog is full of these, the "Three Graces", Rodin's women, and a poor "Hebe, Cupbearer of the Gods" who looks like she's been given silicon breast implants.
This is hilarious: it's revisionist art history, as done by the Photoshop-happy editors of Vogue.
Now go read the original so you can see the pictures, they're really, really disturbing.
I love the way this piece has picked up on the effect of the choice of language used.
Women aren't 'electing' to put babies at risk
MOST of us first learn the word "elective" in school, when we find ourselves with the new-found freedom to take a course like music theory or sculpture. Elective implies freely chosen, life-enhancing. Laser eye-surgery is elective. Tattoos are elective. But the vast majority of so-called elective caesarean sections are not, and it is inappropriate and disingenuous to call them so in medical literature -- as did the recent study in last month's New England Journal of Medicine: "Timing of elective repeat caesarean delivery at term and neonatal outcomes."...
And the media dutifully followed the physicians' pointed fingers toward mothers: "Thousands of women put their babies at needless risk of respiratory problems, hypoglycemia and other medical ailments by scheduling c-section deliveries too early ..." began a Los Angeles Times article.
...
[The article then goes into why they're not actually 'elective' and concludes:]
This is not about women "electing" to put their babies at risk. This is about women being backed into a corner and told what's best, only to then be publicly shamed for "asking for it".