A Mini-Rant on Privacy and Identity
One of the peculiarities of the electronic environment is that people become so profoundly involved in each other that they lose that sense of private identity. Marshal McLuhan
The future McLuhan saw germinating in the late 1960s is growing like a weed today within the electronic garden of pervasive social networking. The identities we once fashioned [...]
Pseudonymity is Hard: Why Your Secret Virtual Identity Has Never Been Safe.
While I reveled in a year of high-profile virtual pseudonymity, the human behind the scenes often felt like a fugitive. Constant vigilance was required to mitigate the risks of inadvertently revealing clues online that would connect the two identities. One slip and the game could be over.
It doesn’t take the proactive work of hackers or [...]
Newest Crazy Google Buzz Privacy Question
Maybe the Google legal department thinks Buzz should be classified like a drug, because this is certainly in the scary disclaimer category:
This extension will have access to your browsing history and private data on all websites.
Thanks for the warning and all, but what’s up with that?
Google Buzz Overtakes Facebook in Race to Bottom of Privacy Barrel
Google Buzz launched this week with default privacy settings that publicly disclose a user’s most frequent chat and e-mail partners. If that wasn’t bad enough, they buried opt-out settings so deeply that it takes an 11 step tutorial to find your way through the counter-intuitive maze of links leading to the required pages. You’d think the company that [...]
Reputation management of online identities: Privacy part 1
Controversy broke out Saturday in the Second Life Plurk community only a few days after my initial post on the topic. Codie had taken the threads from her very popular Bold Sex Question of the Day (BSQOTD) and posted them on her blog. The response was swift and urgently negative. At least from a [...]
