A Myriad of Privacy Concerns Arise as Google Acquires Jaiku
The New York Times reports on Google’s recent acquisition of Jaiku and the privacy concerns it raises:
Google’s acquisition of Jaiku, a small Finnish start-up active in the obscure field of microblogging — a word most often associated with the better-known company Twitter — might not appear to be an earth-shaking event.
But the deal, announced this month, has much of the tech-tracking blogosphere abuzz. Some claim it is the harbinger of a new, truly interconnected world, where a chunk of our existence will migrate online.
To begin with, the reasoning goes, Jaiku is not really about microblogging — those minimessages submitted by text or e-mail that made Twitter famous. Jaiku is “a mobile company in the business of creating smarter presence applications,” and therefore “a leader in a category most people haven’t fully grasped yet,” Tim O’Reilly, a technology conference promoter credited with the phrase Web 2.0, wrote in his blog.
Read the rest of the article which summarizes some of recent discussion on the hypothetical Web 2.0 address book.
Which begs the question, do we really need to expose the prosaic details of our daily lives to public, Internet view? As Ben Kelly points out, we may be reaching a point where the expectation of privacy is nonexistent.
Other websites like Twitter and Jaiku – which Google bought this week – allow you to post the minutia of your day through your PC, even through your cellphone. Twitter asks on simple question: “What are you doing now?” Watch any persons postings for long enough and you’ll build up a good idea of their daily routines, likes and dislikes.
Exposing their lives
But why is this interesting? Because there are elements of society that are willing to expose their entire lives to the world at large. They open up their relationships, their personal lives, their work lives for at least a portion of the world to see.
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What is concerning is that there may come a time when it is hard to keep your personal information private. Not because you chose not to share it but because the culture of sharing has become so rampant that your friends keep mentioning you.If that happens we might as well kiss the notion of privacy away and resign ourselves to the fact that anything we say or do will end up in the public domain.