The Wall Street Journal published an article today entitled “Having Lots of Online Friends Could Mean Privacy Trouble.” The article articulates some of the institutional privacy concerns that some users do have and suggests that more users should have.
Now, i do believe in privacy concerns and i’m genuinely worried about institutional misuses of private data, but i’m not the average consumers. As we all know, consumers will happily sell their privacy. They don’t understand the implications of this. And thus, there’s no incentive for corporations to not try to collect it and make money off of it. This is where the government should step in. But since the government is controlled by corporations….
Anyhow, i won’t follow that rant.
The big thing to realize is that most consumers are far more concerned with local privacy, or intimacy concerns. They’re worried about their friends taking their information out of context, about their mom seeing something intended for their friends, of a future boss seeing a drunken picture. Consumers are far more concerned with those who have limited local authority over them than institutional authority. [Yes, here’s an opportunity for a study…]
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