After boring accounting stuff yesterday, let's do another exercise in "trivial self-observation" which is hopefully more entertaining. Let's talk about semi-privacy: the littoral between public and private spheres.
#TuesdayThoughts
#TuesdayThoughts
Sunday was #DataPrivacyDay and private vs public matters *a lot* in law, economics, sociology, cryptosecurity of course, but how much time have you spent recently choosing semi-privacy over real privacy?
There's an econ joke that defines economics as "finding separating hyperplanes in the n-dimensional vector space", but often investigating is more interesting than finding them. Turns out the public-private boundary is as fuzzy as most boundaries we like to simplify as in-out.
When was the last time you poured your heart out to your best friend about a messy breakup -- in a cafe? On your Facebook timeline?
Most security efforts (cyber or real) focus on properly protecting your privacy and chide you for not doing enough: scrappy passwords, door unlocked, ramshackle fences. But the creation of semi-private spaces might be the most ingenious social engineering of the 21st century.
Semi-private spaces are the spaces where we feel comfortable doing private things in public because we feel that our voices will not carry far and those who hear it won't be all that interested or won't use it against us.
So introspection time: when do you spend in semi-private spaces, and how did it affect your behavior? I'm off to a cafe now for a "private" evening...
Twitter is a semi-private space. Starbucks puts a lot of effort into making semi-privacy comforting. If you use Gmail, you're ok with someone reading your mail, and if it's only a machine. Facebook lets you post a status update to "friends of friends".
The new economy runs on semi-privacy. Why? Or financial budget is limited. Our supply of private information is unlimited, and, more relevantly, it's non-rivalrous. Any private information we pass on we can still keep ourselves.
