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Opinion
The Desegregation of Privacy Issues: Closing the Privacy Gap?
10/11/2006
The Republican Party is discovering this as it disintegrates due to a cover-up that was instigated by years-old e-mails and instant messages. Just like the kids on MySpace, adults using the Internet have to worry about how transparent the things they do are, and how easily they can end up where you don’t want them to. Many people weren’t paying attention while it was just lying about dollars and war, but when sex entered the picture, we started paying attention. It became obvious to many more that the pattern was the same everywhere. We’re going to enjoy more of this, and the transparency will not limit itself to a single political party.
When I was young, we maybe heard that there had been a hurricane in Florida a week or so afterwards. Now the explosion of information and communications technology puts us right there, in the middle of the details. Can you imagine what and when the public at large would have known about Katrina if she had struck in the early 1950s? I can imagine. The answers are, “not very much,” and “months later.”
Is the glass half full or half empty? Is it “loss of privacy” or creation of “transparency.” It might not matter. It may be that we have to cope and that is inevitable, no matter what we call it. As a Baby Boomer who grew up in different times, this makes me uncomfortable, but I wonder how much it will bother the children of our Millennial Generation?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently spoke of a coming aspect of this transparency that thrills me:
He predicted that “truth predictor” software would, within five years, “hold politicians to account.” People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.
“One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false.’ We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability,” he told the newspaper.
Are we closing the “privacy gap” by bringing about the end of privacy and the beginning of ubiquitous transparency? I kind of like the thought. Bring it on, this can’t come too soon. To those who don’t like it, I have to say, “Tough. Get used to it.”
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