Check out Andrea James’ post “The Ascendancy of the non-private person,” on how the Web is affecting our view of “privacy as a commodity vs. privacy as a right.”
A small example: Since the dawn of Web time, there have been 2 types of people in the world: those who provided their real name and personal information on websites and those who didn’t. Back in the Bronze Age – before Facebook – most people were reluctant to give their personal information on the web – except maybe for certain, highly secure financial transactions. Over the last few years, the number of people in the first group has exploded, if not becoming so universal that the unfortunate few commonly hear: “Whadya mean you don’t have a Facebook.”
And it’s not just the under 20 set who grew up with the Web that have been willing to raise their privacy hemline. Many of the new users on FB are old enough to have read — and taken advantage of — the Supreme Court’s 1965 finding in Griswold v. Connecticut that there is a personal right to privacy.
Something big is happening here. It’s not just that people are giving away their names and (sometimes very) personal photos & info on the Web. Our use of Facebook, Google, etc. has begun to change our notion of privacy and what’s personal. And some of these notional changes have begun to affect life beyond the “Matrix” — the things that we are now willing to share and how we treat others is not only changing on Facebook and other virtual places on the web – but in real life as well.
In Griswold, the Supreme Court felt that the various protections of Constitution when looked at together formed “penumbras” or “emanations” sufficient to create a personal privacy right (yeah, I see the characters of the Justice League of America). 40 years later, the Web has started to emit its own penumbras and emanations that appear to be changing how we think about and protect that right.
