Why Privacy Is Obsolete

“Why come you ain’t got no tattoo?”

If web 2.0 was the idea of user generated content, then web 3.0 is surely being built on the theory of eliminating privacy. I give privacy about 5 years tops before we don’t even need a word for it anymore. The current trends are disturbing. Let’s take a look:

We started in 1999 by posting our journals online with Livejournal. Then MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, and many others came along and we started posting lists of our friends. Linkedin added our job histories and coworkers. With Flickr, all of our photos became public.

Recently, Twitter emerged and now we can provide constant updates about what we’re doing at any given second. Mashup Plazes with it, and now the world can see where we’re doing it too. I’m not even sure it’s necessary though, as most of us voluntarily carry around GPS locators in our cell phones.

Pretty soon we’ll be carrying our medical history, dental records, credit history, and probably our 4th grade report cards around on our drivers licenses and passports.

Recapping, it’s now possible to find out where we are, what we’re doing, who we’re with, what we’re thinking about it, and view pictures of it. Is this the world we want? Do we really want all of this information public?

I laugh at people who still run cookie blocker programs to “protect their privacy” while they still twitter away from their cell phone.

Is society really that far away from implanting microchips into humans? My thoughts race to futurama style career chips. We already put them in pets.

Do we really want to go down the path from the movie Idiocracy - where everybody has a barcode scannable tattoo on their forearm? I’m sure there’d be tons of people in line to do so… if only somebody made a social network around it.

July 24th, 2007