We are in a new era of humanity where everything you do is being taped, recorded and broadcast for the world to see. Who is doing this? Is it some secret government cabal? Some clan of hackers so elite that they can capture your every movement? No, sadly it is just you and your computer.
I fought the Facebook battle for a long time. I finally succumbed to the madness to build up possible references and contacts for my career. It wasn’t long before everyone and their grandmother had requested to make me their friend even though I may not have known them personally or hadn’t spoken to them in over a decade. All of these people are opening up their lives and their families to me, and even to my “friends”. They aren’t concerned with this. Only 1 in 3 Facebook users even reviewed the changes to the privacy settings that Facebook pushed out. Only 1 in 3 people cared enough about their privacy to make sure that the entire (internet connected) world didn’t have full access to their lives. 1984 isn’t going to happen, it has and we have let it.
To me privacy and anonymity go hand in hand. Recently Bruce Schneier posted an article about anonymity on the internet and how certain people in the government are trying to abolish this by forcing every user everywhere to authenticate when they access the web. This is supposed to stop hackers and criminals from participating in the online world. The first commenter said it best “If you outlaw anonymity on the Internet, only outlaws will have anonymity on the Internet.”
