With the topic of privacy over the past week, we've talked a couple of times about CCTV and its recorded monitoring of public locations. I know that this is quite a contested issue, that some feel this is an invasion of privacy that does not warrant the security it offers. Regardless, CCTV is widespread, and overall people accept that they will be monitored in many public places.
This got me thinking about how privacy is so dependent upon location, and furthermore, how this relates to privacy online. Physical locations explicitly define the public from the private: CCTVs are acceptable on the street, but definitely not inside the home. Of course online (specifically SNS), what is public and what is private isn't so defined as there is no traditional sense of location. Danah Boyd (from the set reading) talks about this 'grey area' of information privacy online: much of what is posted online is not private, but it is assumed that it will only be read by certain people.
On Facebook, for example, friends can comment on other friend's walls, but the comment reaches further people through news feeds, as well as being viewable by anyone with access to the wall. Just who a wall post will reach is actually pretty much unknown to the commenter, being dependent on a combination of privacy settings, friends lists, and networks. Sure there are privacy settings, but short of limiting all content to "friends only", privacy quickly becomes a murky term.
Facebook 'Places' is an interesting complication. To me, the idea seems to be a sort of combination of CCTV and SNS; the Facebook Places user can be tagged and their physical location shared (monitored). A part of me believes that (just like with CCTV) while in public locations, I can't expect my actions to be completely private. Yet the thought of being tagged on Facebook Places, and my location being traceable across online networks is somewhat unsettling. In a sense, this becomes another grey area of privacy: the knowledge of my location is public, but I also want some degree of privacy and control over this information.
Again, it seems Facebook is not only pushing the boundaries of privacy, but also pushing the boundaries of public information.
This got me thinking about how privacy is so dependent upon location, and furthermore, how this relates to privacy online. Physical locations explicitly define the public from the private: CCTVs are acceptable on the street, but definitely not inside the home. Of course online (specifically SNS), what is public and what is private isn't so defined as there is no traditional sense of location. Danah Boyd (from the set reading) talks about this 'grey area' of information privacy online: much of what is posted online is not private, but it is assumed that it will only be read by certain people.
On Facebook, for example, friends can comment on other friend's walls, but the comment reaches further people through news feeds, as well as being viewable by anyone with access to the wall. Just who a wall post will reach is actually pretty much unknown to the commenter, being dependent on a combination of privacy settings, friends lists, and networks. Sure there are privacy settings, but short of limiting all content to "friends only", privacy quickly becomes a murky term.
Facebook 'Places' is an interesting complication. To me, the idea seems to be a sort of combination of CCTV and SNS; the Facebook Places user can be tagged and their physical location shared (monitored). A part of me believes that (just like with CCTV) while in public locations, I can't expect my actions to be completely private. Yet the thought of being tagged on Facebook Places, and my location being traceable across online networks is somewhat unsettling. In a sense, this becomes another grey area of privacy: the knowledge of my location is public, but I also want some degree of privacy and control over this information.
Again, it seems Facebook is not only pushing the boundaries of privacy, but also pushing the boundaries of public information.
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