Privacy has been on my mind a lot since my honeymoon.
No, I wasn’t concerned about some sort of honeymoon photos getting out. While on our trip, I discovered that an author and a singer were also in New Orleans, from the constant stream of data from they both post to the web. Not only did I know they were in the same city, but I had a rough itinerary of their every day. This, without any effort on my part beyond reading updates in my twitter followed list.
In the same vein, you have Scott Kurtz, who I linked to some time ago as he was sharing everything in his mind about his wife.
Sure, these are celebrities (minor celebrities, perhaps, but still), and as such, they’re always operating with a larger data shadow than the average person. But inasmuch as they’re pushing what’s available in the realm of self-promotion, one wonders how much this is indicative of the future.
There’s a lot of talk that we’re heading to a world where to be successful each of us will have to operate essentially as free agents. In that environment, it’s possible that this strategy of broadcasting everything will become a norm, not just in the walled gardens of Facebook or other networks, but as a general lifestyle of marketing your own life.
Given that possibility, zegolf’s post about privacy seems more likely, in that over time we’ll simply have to accept that no one cares about privacy in the same way that we once did. I wonder though if we might instead have some sort of backlash, in time, where we respond to this change by volunteering even less than we used to.
For what it’s worth, Gaiman is incredibly cool, and when I tweeted about having discovered he was in New Orleans, he responded to me with where we could see him and Palmer.