[Air-l] Facebook and privacy

[Charles Ess]

I don't want to take away from the importance of the comments below -
but on their occasion, simply comment:
in the fields of information and computer ethics (ICE), one of the most
important theoretical approaches these days is authored by a chap at Oxford
named Luciano Floridi.  His information ontology is a radical re-visioning
of traditional metaphysics and ontology, so as to make "information" the
basic unit of reality.
On this view, further, you _are_ your information (Floridi has recently
denoted human beings as "inforgs" - (connected) informational organisms.

On this view, privacy is very much a matter of a state of data.  Generally,
as computer ethicist James Moor famously (at least within ICE) noted,
electronic means of communication, and most especially the internet,
"grease" information, making it far easier to transmit, collect,
redistribute, etc.
Within this framework, privacy is a matter of "informational friction" -
slowing down / stopping specific information from leaking beyond specified
boundaries.

I'm _not_ trying to suggest an either/or here between privacy as data and
privacy as user experience - but rather to say that it would be really
interesting to combine these two views ...

so many projects, so little time...  Thanks, everyone, for your comments on
this thread - invaluable!
- c.

> 
> danah has articulated something enormously important:
> 
>  "Privacy is an experience that people have, not a state of data."
> 
> This has strong implications for the ways we design technologies for
> privacy. If privacy is a user experience issue, then the process for
> design should be organized accordingly and cannot be accomplished without
> the involvement of actual participants in the community who will use that
> technology. If privacy is a data issue, then a completely different set of
> heuristics apply.
> 
> thank you, danah!
> 
> Andrea
> 
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Exemplary persons seek harmony, not sameness. -- Analects 13.23