NO2ID

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... sfeed=true

We are living in a digital goldfish bowl and I can't quite bury my qualms

I'd like to see a national, collective endeavour to protect individual privacy, because privacy confers a kind of freedom

o Deborah Orr
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 February 2012 22.00 GMT

Imagine that you were required, every day, to keep an old-fashioned diary recording all your interactions with the world; every bus you took, every song you listened to, every television programme you dipped into, every social arrangement you made. Imagine that, far from keeping a little tin lock on it, or scrawling "Private. Go away!" on the cover, you were instead required to hand it over at the end of each day to all sorts of complete strangers, who would then own your information, for ever. That would be a ridiculous situation for a free and autonomous person to put up with, an absurd and sinister exercise in identity mining. But it's how many of us live now, in the digital world.

The minutiae of our private lives, our personalities, is commercially valuable. Look at the vast numbers involved in the flotation of Facebook. It would be hyperbole to say our souls were being sold on the New York stock exchange. Nonetheless, disquiet about the currency in which people pay for their technological freedom is regularly expressed, in all sorts of ways, whether it is photographs finding their way from a blog into a newspaper, or social-networking indiscretions getting people fired.

Mostly, one buries one's qualms about living in a digital goldfish bowl – the advantages outweigh disadvantages that are so far from being inconvenient that they are closer to intangible. Anyway, there's not much choice in the matter, really. Be there, or be socially isolated, overtaken by technological events. Distrust about possibly heinous corporate habits? That's just paranoia, isn't it? A stroppy refusal to believe in the benign self-regulation of robust, innovative, dynamic, corporate capitalism?

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