Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Privacy Manifesto

There is a lot of debate regarding online privacy.  Should everything online be private?  Should it all be wide open, with everyone's information everywhere?  Well, I would say there is a medium to those two extremes.

People need to choose what they want others to see online, and implement their own privacy plan accordingly.  If we make everything private, across the board for everyone, then all internet users will be anonymous.  Many people don't want to be anonymous, and the ones who are tend to be a nuisance in comment fields.

What we do to solve this problem is let everyone control their own privacy.  Something along the lines of what Facebook did with their privacy policy.  Whether or not those privacy settings are being properly implemented by the folks at Facebook is one thing, but the concept is what I'm interested in.  And you don't need buttons to click that say "make this private," you can just do it on your own by deciding what to put online.  For example, I deleted my Facebook.  When I do a general name search for myself on Google, the results are not me.  That's mainly because I don't have a Facebook page.  Same goes for image searches.  I untagged all of the photos I was in on Facebook and dragged them into a folder on my computer.  That's privacy.  I can look at them at my leisure, and people I don't know aren't gazing at them.

The example I just gave basically sums up my Privacy Manifesto.  Take your life into your own hands, and consider who's reading your information and clicking through your photos before you click "post." Maybe you just don't care who knows everything about you, and if you're that care-free then more power to ya.

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