It’s an old meme on this blog, but I think it is essentially true that the Big Brother of Orwellian nightmare isn’t really the government, who do their best to spy on us all the time in order to track down people who post abusive tweets and such like, but us. We are Big Brother. The mobile phone and the Internet have combined to
I’m sure most people, as I do, assume that if they are in a business meeting them someone will be recording them on a pen with a movie camera in it or through their glasses or whatever. But what is to be done?. I remember a super story about this that I saw in a newspaper a while ago. Some Austrian wildlife photographers had set up cameras in a forest in order to capture exotic forest creatures going about their business, but instead caught an Austrian politician up to his
Members of the Carinthian Hunting Society in southern Austria are accustomed to observing animals in the wild, such as the western European red deer or wild boar, with the help of cameras in the forest. But the hunting society got more than it bargained for last week when their cameras recorded footage of a politician enjoying an explicit sexual encounter in the woods.
[From Forest Sex Footage Sparks Debate in Austria – SPIEGEL ONLINE]
As one comment I saw had it, “if it had been with his wife it would have been even bigger news”. Amusing, indeed. But the story does raise some interesting points about mundane privacy in a camera-infested world. I don’t know whether, in a world of smartphones and social media, one might have a reasonable expectation of privacy when having sex out in the woods somewhere. I would have thought not, but I am not a lawyer (or a wildlife photographer). It’s getting really hard to think about privacy and what we want from it.
Privacy is not a static construct. It is not an inherent property of any particular information or setting. It is a process by which people seek to have control over a social situation by managing impressions, information flows, and context.
[FromWhy Teens Are Innovators Of A New Public Form Of Privacy | Co.Exist | ideas + impact]
As I’ve written, blogged and spoke about many times before, I think that the only construct that makes sense is to think about privacy as a function of control over personal information.
I’ve talked before about how privacy is not a “thing,” it’s a tradeoff.
From Privacy Is About Tradeoffs… And Things Go Wrong When Those Tradeoffs Are Not Clear | Techdirt
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a big problem is that the tradeoffs aren’t as clear or as explicit as they should be.
From Privacy Is About Tradeoffs… And Things Go Wrong When Those Tradeoffs Are Not Clear | Techdirt
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Snippings 