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I've lent people money. Friends, too. Usually that's a tough situation. I live by the maxim that "if you loan money to a friend, be prepared to lose the money o

I've lent people money. Friends, too. Usually that's a tough situation. I live by the maxim that "if you loan money to a friend, be prepared to lose the money or the friend." Still, you want to help your friends out, right? Thing is, sometimes those friends (or other folks) have friends who enable them. Maybe it's to go out to the bars at night or buy a new game so they can play together. It's hard to predict what their impact will be, at least with the information most of us have to work with. Now, suppose I did have a considerable amount of information, such as Facebook would. I could make more accurate predictions, but there will always be gaps. I always feel uncomfortable having personal conversations over Facebook because I always feel like someone's looking over my shoulder. Or maybe I don't want the communication remembered. Either way, it's a blank spot that can't be confirmed or denied, so it will always be an imperfect, some might say discriminatory measure. I'm reminded of the scene in Gattaca when the protagonist is born and instantly a doctor preforms a DNA test to show all the disadvantages he's statistically likely to experience in life: asthma, ADHD, and so on. I'm starting to feel like that's becoming the case today, but with personal history instead of genetics. You can't escape your genome but you can grow up and change yourself from the immature person that made mistakes as an adolescent. Still, the record remains. Something doesn't feel right about all of this.

taurath 11y ago
This is pretty much the core of privacy that we're losing - the ability to reinvent ones self. At age 18 I left just about everything I knew behind, and I'm not sure it'd be possible to do so now. We have things like bankruptcies that go off of your record in 7 years - I'll bet if given the choice banks would love to see them forever. Full information is not always a good thing - it almost always ignores people's ability to be flexible.
Silhouette 11y ago
Something doesn't feel right about all of this. I think that's because our societies have evolved over many centuries with the basic truth that past indiscretions would tend to be forgiven and forgotten in time. For the first time ever, in literally the space of one generation, we have created both mainstream infrastructure that allows unprecedented monitoring of individuals and mainstream infrastructure that never forgets. It's going to take further generational change to adapt to those new possibilities and decide how -- and even if -- we should use that technology. In the meantime, sadly, varying degrees of bad things are going to happen to a lot of people with varying degrees of innocence through little or no fault of their own. My greatest concern is that many people in our societies who have the loudest voices in the media and the greatest power through running governments and to some extent big businesses also have very little understanding of the technology and its implications. They have bizarre incentives that promote doing some bad things with it, and little accountability for (or maybe even awareness of) the potential risks they take on our behalf, and worst of all they're convincing ordinary people who don't work with the technology and understand its implications that this is all OK and to be expected.
- outofcuriosity 11y ago
  We could boycott networks & technologies that infringe upon our ability to exist as private individuals and to self-determine: Don't use the wifi toothbrush or the Fitbit, don't use Facebook or Twitter, stay connected with friends using email or (!) the postal service. Use less technology and gain more freedom. Alternately, market collusion and the unquenchable desire of people to sell their information in exchange for Javascript-enabled friendships will force us into a grim future where the mistakes of the people we love & an assortment of bureaucratically-mandated sensors impede our pursuit of happiness. Perhaps it's time to draw our lines in the sand.
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    Unfortunately I don't expect a boycott will ever work because there will always be statistically significant number of users for Facebook to run their social experiments on, so there won't be any reason for them to stop, even if the populations of entire countries delete their accounts. I'm still holding out for a privacy-centric social network. Only problem is I won't join it unless enough of my friends do, so I guess we'll see. I hardly use Facebook anymore anyway.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >It's going to take further generational change to adapt to those new possibilities and decide how -- and even if -- we should use that technology. The problem is for most things we're not doing any deciding. We just invent new technology, and then we have to live with its consequences, while never stopping and thinking about it or actually and democratically deciding if we should use it and how we should restrict it. All that with the sole exception of when there's comercial interests at stake. Then we go out of our way to prevent the technology from messing with them, e.g. adding DRM to help with copyright. But for everything that can mess up the lives of millions of people (be it because of lifestyle changes, environmental damage, invasion of privacy, etc) we either never get to decide and restrict consequences, or we do very little of it.

taurath 11y ago

This is pretty much the core of privacy that we're losing - the ability to reinvent ones self. At age 18 I left just about everything I knew behind, and I'm not sure it'd be possible to do so now. We have things like bankruptcies that go off of your record in 7 years - I'll bet if given the choice banks would love to see them forever. Full information is not always a good thing - it almost always ignores people's ability to be flexible.

Silhouette 11y ago

Something doesn't feel right about all of this. I think that's because our societies have evolved over many centuries with the basic truth that past indiscretions would tend to be forgiven and forgotten in time. For the first time ever, in literally the space of one generation, we have created both mainstream infrastructure that allows unprecedented monitoring of individuals and mainstream infrastructure that never forgets. It's going to take further generational change to adapt to those new possibilities and decide how -- and even if -- we should use that technology. In the meantime, sadly, varying degrees of bad things are going to happen to a lot of people with varying degrees of innocence through little or no fault of their own. My greatest concern is that many people in our societies who have the loudest voices in the media and the greatest power through running governments and to some extent big businesses also have very little understanding of the technology and its implications. They have bizarre incentives that promote doing some bad things with it, and little accountability for (or maybe even awareness of) the potential risks they take on our behalf, and worst of all they're convincing ordinary people who don't work with the technology and understand its implications that this is all OK and to be expected.

outofcuriosity 11y ago
We could boycott networks & technologies that infringe upon our ability to exist as private individuals and to self-determine: Don't use the wifi toothbrush or the Fitbit, don't use Facebook or Twitter, stay connected with friends using email or (!) the postal service. Use less technology and gain more freedom. Alternately, market collusion and the unquenchable desire of people to sell their information in exchange for Javascript-enabled friendships will force us into a grim future where the mistakes of the people we love & an assortment of bureaucratically-mandated sensors impede our pursuit of happiness. Perhaps it's time to draw our lines in the sand.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Unfortunately I don't expect a boycott will ever work because there will always be statistically significant number of users for Facebook to run their social experiments on, so there won't be any reason for them to stop, even if the populations of entire countries delete their accounts. I'm still holding out for a privacy-centric social network. Only problem is I won't join it unless enough of my friends do, so I guess we'll see. I hardly use Facebook anymore anyway.
coldtea 11y ago
>It's going to take further generational change to adapt to those new possibilities and decide how -- and even if -- we should use that technology. The problem is for most things we're not doing any deciding. We just invent new technology, and then we have to live with its consequences, while never stopping and thinking about it or actually and democratically deciding if we should use it and how we should restrict it. All that with the sole exception of when there's comercial interests at stake. Then we go out of our way to prevent the technology from messing with them, e.g. adding DRM to help with copyright. But for everything that can mess up the lives of millions of people (be it because of lifestyle changes, environmental damage, invasion of privacy, etc) we either never get to decide and restrict consequences, or we do very little of it.