{"id":966,"date":"2009-03-28T09:08:44","date_gmt":"2009-03-28T16:08:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/28\/on-privacy\/"},"modified":"2015-11-21T16:38:59","modified_gmt":"2015-11-21T16:38:59","slug":"on-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/on-privacy\/","title":{"rendered":"On privacy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/alexandra666\/3298490562\/\" title=\"London Fields by alexandra666, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3309\/3298490562_cb68a80dfe_b.jpg\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\" alt=\"London Fields\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Random theory on a quiet and rainy Saturday afternoon in the city.<\/p>\n<p>Privacy exists only in the eye of the beholder and is more prevalent and easier to engineer than ever before. It&#8217;s all a question of audience. I&#8217;ll explain. The new standard in our ways of communicating (especially in the geekdom) is to publicly display, reveal and share all the time, whether its our <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.co.uk\/latitude\/intro.html\">location<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dopplr.com\">our trips<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\">our photos<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\">our thoughts<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/registry\/wishlist\">our desires<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/delicious.com\/\">our interests<\/a> and what we go through and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\">who we know<\/a>. If we simply stop using these services, nothing in our actual behaviour changes, we still go places, we still take pictures, we still share them with who we wish to by &#8220;downgrading&#8221; to sending them directly to people, family etc but our public self-actualisation is decreased and our privacy increases. I find it intriguing that privacy isn&#8217;t explicitly part of Maslow&#8217;s hierarchy of needs actually, perhaps its a given, perhaps we&#8217;re only <a href=\"http:\/\/nymag.com\/news\/features\/27341\/\">making a fuss over it<\/a> because of the past 5 years of rapid technology changes.<\/p>\n<p>When everyone twitters about what they do all the time, the noise drowns out the signals doesn&#8217;t it? If you suddenly decide to stop using a staple means of communication, it&#8217;s like you don&#8217;t exist anymore. It&#8217;s far worst than if you decided to use it less. If you lost your cell phone these days and didn&#8217;t care to replace it, and went back to using your landline, you&#8217;d essentially be dead to most people. Wouldn&#8217;t be surprising if they called the police to check on you, after all who would want to do such a thing? Well maybe it&#8217;ll be the same thing if you wanted to <a href=\"http:\/\/consumerist.com\/5157481\/facebook-wont-let-you-remove-dead-relatives-page-per-policy\">stop using facebook<\/a>. I closed my account long before it had overtaken the world in such a dramatic way. I suspect in 2 years time people will have moved on to using something else, but frankly, I&#8217;d rather observe and privatly self-actualise, write more than 140 characters, post up pictures when I really want to and generally concentrate on making my life something that is mine and not everyone else&#8217;s too. It&#8217;s hard enough as it is.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a strange theory but I kindof like it, for today at least.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Random theory on a quiet and rainy Saturday afternoon in the city. Privacy exists only in the eye of the beholder and is more prevalent and easier to engineer than ever before. It&#8217;s all a question of audience. I&#8217;ll explain. The new standard in our ways of communicating (especially in the geekdom) is to publicly&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/on-privacy\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">On privacy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[59,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-fA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1916,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966\/revisions\/1916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}