My mother forwarded me an email recently with a link to a local news story. It warned, in grave terms, that your geotagged photos from your iPhone were revealing where you live and where your kids go to school. Anywhere you take pictures, you could be exposing your child to a predator! Whoa! Turn off geotagging!
But wait a second, isn't there another way to find out where you live? Oh, that's right - the phone book. And what about the school where your child goes? Well, if you live in a small town, there's probably only one school that they go to. Otherwise, is it really sensitive information where your child attends? If a predator is after your particular child, you'll have bigger worries than their discovering where he or she goes to school. We can't hide where the schools and playgrounds are because we have no idea who to hide them from and because parents can be predators, too. You won't keep that information private, so there's no reason to pretend you have control.
The reality is that much of this kind of privacy has not existed in our lifetimes and probably even less so before that. It's a recent development for us to even think so critically about privacy, because it used to be simple - you might have had a single private space in your home, and if you lived in a city you had some moderate anonymity in public. Even that wasn't necessarily true; ask my grandmother what kind of privacy her family had in the tenement apartment her family shared on the Lower East Side in the 1920s. As our worlds have grown larger in scope but smaller in accessibility, we've had the luxury of worrying about who knows what about us.
So rewind 30 years, before the emergence of personal computing and before Twitter and Skype. When you walked into a department store and signed up for a charge card, they took down all of your information. And they kept track of the things you bought. Did they keep this all private? No way! They turned around and sold it to a marketer for a couple of bucks. The marketer sent you brochures and circulars, and they called you at home during dinner to sell you mail-order frozen steaks or Hawaiian vacations. And they sold your information to every other marketer that would pay them a buck for it.
So what's your grocery store's privacy policy? What about your plumber's privacy policy, or your realtor's? And what about the woman who works the pastry counter at your favorite cafe - will she out you for your lemon bar addiction when you come in with a date? Tons of data is out in the world about you, both structured and unstructured. You are a walking, talking privacy disaster, and there isn't a damn thing to be done about it without retreating into some kind of self-sufficient wilderness life. And we haven't even talked about the Internet yet!
The accessibility of search and social media have made us all aware of how much data are being gathered about us and being used, both for products and to serve us targeted ads. But the great thing is that we've set expectations that each one of them needs to publish and stick to a privacy policy. And we have the right to read it, pick it apart and yell at them about it, or choose not to use a business whose policy we don't like. This is a huge leap in the transparency of how our data is being used! The Internet titans are way more transparent than their brick and mortar cousins. I know much better what Amazon is doing with my data when I search "paper towels" than I do when when I buy them in person at Joe's Paper Towel Emporium.
In addition to easily accessible privacy policies, the other advantage of Internet data use is that the big companies we care most about are not going and selling our data to advertisers and marketing agencies. Facebook is very happy to allow an advertiser to show their ad only to 25-year olds who are engaged and living within 20 miles of Philadelphia. But Facebook does not hand the advertiser a list of those people. That's the deal we get on the Internet. And it's way better than the one we get from the tangible world around us.
