Cross-posted at OWNI.
Our BoingBoing friend, Cory Doctorow, has a great Ted Talk in which he gives an inspired and radical solution to the lack of privacy on the internet. To begin, he notes that Facebook, as just one example, doesn’t just allow, but incites disclosure by rewarding it, but only intermittently (a la B.F. Skinner and the Skinner box).
Meanwhile, parents try to protect children from disclosure and exposure with surveillance tools that block and report content. This, Doctorow argues provocatively, only trains kids to accept surveillance as normal and unproblematic. Instead of spying on our kids, he suggests, we should be teaching them to manipulate and avert involuntary disclosure, such that they grow up learning to question instead of accept the use and abuse of their personal information.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 11
Arney Molstar — May 13, 2011
Legitimise privacy? That's a weird thought, when google and facebook are selling "In the real world you can never be private, We are trying to bring that to the Internet." This reminds me of the freedom box http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
William — May 13, 2011
It's easy enough to create fake profiles with both real and fake friends on a small scale. What we really need though is a computer program that creates and manages several hundred fake profiles for each real person on a service such as facebook. Using sophisticated AI, each profile can be logged into and updated at specific intervals with pre-programmed responses. Fake people conversing with fake people, real people with fake people, real people with real people and facebook would have a very difficult time sifting through such information.
The best way to destroy the value of a site like facebook or myspace is to make 'real' people indistinguishable from 'fake' people.
m — May 13, 2011
the only real problem that I see with this is what it assumes about both the kids and the parents: how are we supposed to teach them what programs to downloead and how to use them? How do you encrypt your info? Spoofing the personal information is something that everyone can do at least (and something that us adults should probably do as well, even though it cen seem a bit juvenile), so that's something reasonable to expect. But where are they to learn the rest?
meerkat — May 15, 2011
Thanks for the driveby fat-stigma, lecture guy! Does the Wii Fit really base your "age" on your weight rather than your, like, balance? I don't even know what this allegedly fat-causing food he mentions is.
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