Global Moxie

Hi Beach,

Thanks for your note -- that's a great way of putting the difference in approaches to people search.

Since people's social-network accounts provide one way to disambiguate search results, it seems to me that this type of service will be an important element in establishing the type of canonical URL/identity for people that I've been posting about lately. Will be interesting to see if the two approaches eventually meet in the middle.

Thanks for providing this service. And, hey, I'll look out for you at last.fm.

All best, Josh

Good points! I imagine that consumers will demand some kind of opt-out arrangement to satisfy privacy concerns. And your point about having "separate personas" is a great one... I wonder if these services might consider ways to segment your public/private self so that you can decide what info you want to share with friends, with family, with the general public. (Should different standards apply to public figures?)

Sooner or later, though, I imagine that these decisions will go out of our own personal control. The info is already available floating around out there, waiting to be found and aggregated. Our histories are already available on the web, and someone's going to pull them together, for better or worse (probably both).

New York Magazine recently had a fascinating article about the generation gap that's emerging over whether or not the loss of privacy is a big deal. I'm certainly skittish about having every detail about me available to any curiosity seeker, but by and large, those in their early 20s and younger actively pursue that transparency. From the article:

We are in the sticky center of a vast psychological experiment, one that’s only just begun to show results. More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. ...

Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.

Uncomfortable as it seems to me that our cushions of privacy are shrinking, it seems there's a whole generation who treats that trend with a collective shrug, even embraces it. This isn't something that I celebrate, and it's too early to say exactly where it will lead us. But it will likely be futile to try to stop it.