I cleaned up this blog several months ago (not long after my virtual stranger Googling me incident) and deleted all the personal entries that were too personal. I left anything I considered benign, and anything related to my mother, benign or not. Having had a online journal for so long, it’s still an endlessly fascinating subject to me — this need and desire to expose myself on the one hand, yet my concern for privacy on the other.
I’ve been thinking about how differently my son’s generation must view privacy. And I know I’m onto a relevant topic because a friend and expert in this field is seriously considering the implications of this as well. I had my son visiting me for four days and he was talking about myspace and about how they post party announcements there which was an interesting and updated version of the story I heard last week: mom discovers a 15+ year old flyer for a house party at her house while she and dad were away. A printed flyer. I’ll bet you kids don’t print flyers anymore.
Sites like myspace, flickr, youtube, twitter, etc, along with your cell/smart phone mean at any given moment you can broadcast your whereabouts and your whattodos, and can share intimate and assorted details about your personal life for most, if not all, the world to see. And kids do. Without qualms. So when these children become adults, do you think they’re going to be bothered by cashless transactions or FastTrak devices that can tell their friends where they are at any given moment or RFID tagged everything? I think not — these things will only make their lives simpler: gratification faster, information sharing with their pals seamless, and fridges keeping themselves full. Why wouldn’t you want this kind of technology? Who cares if the marketers (and whoever else they want to share information with) know and keep track of everything you buy, or that someone could paint a pretty accurate picture of your life based on your travel history, especially if they tie it with your financial transactions because who in that generation is going to care that every single purchase someone makes will leave some sort of electronic mark?
I feel old and paranoid just talking about it. Everytime I shred a piece of paper with personally identifying information on it, I wonder to myself, why do I bother? Why, when you can look up any one of the x domain names I own and pull up an address? Why bother when my trash can has my address on it? Why, when someone can just steal my mail — who cares about all the credit offers I’ve already shredded when the next one will be stolen before it reaches my mailbox? Just this weekend I received a pin number for a credit card I never received — I wonder where that ended up. And just try not to give your social security number away — everytime I ask someone if they really need it and can’t I provide some other method of identifying myself, there isn’t and I can’t or it’ll take me two extra days — and honestly, most of the time it’s not worth the two extra days for me so I admit it, I’ll give it up pretty easily. Nowadays, identity theft is to be expected. You are now encouraged and expected to anticipate it and to monitor your records and credit reports accordingly. I feel like I’m fighting an endless battle that few people of my generation care about, and far less, if any, of my son’s generation will care about.
What’s left to defend if everything about you is electronically recorded? Soon, you’ll want to and be able to monitor the state of your elderly and forgetful mother, your drug addicted teenager, his thieving friends, your daughter and her questionable sexual behaviour. And then the government will want to, too.
Maybe this generation doesn’t watch or read enough science fiction. Or maybe I’ve read too much.
