Human Error? Blame the Machine!
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. “In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.”
Advice from Mom? The same Mom that read my diary and searched thru my knapsack for evidence of drug use or sexual activity? That Mom?
Um, so judging others by appearance is ok, but the internet is bad for allowing people to reach out and share? Why is it that when humans screw up, it’s always technology that’s to blame? Let us not forget the evil cell phone that forces jerks to take calls during dinner and to yell at the top of their lungs despite being in a restaurant. Bad, bad technology.
Back to privacy in the cyber age. As any teen can tell you, the biggest invasion to privacy comes from within your own nuclear family. Like small towns in the 19th century were gossip-free fortresses of solitude. Give me a break.
In a class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that received some attention last year, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree analyzed more than 4,000 Facebook profiles of students, including links to friends who said they were gay. The pair was able to predict, with 78 percent accuracy, whether a profile belonged to a gay male.
Sorry MIT geeks, this is 2010! People aren’t afraid for others to know they are gay, and this “class project” smacks of a creepy McCarthy era witch hunt.
Face it, the issue that is conveniently ignored here is that people don’t really care. Privacy and secrecy has gone the way of the rotary phone. Why assume that the information was broadcast by mistake out of stupidity, when any car with a rainbow bumper sticker will tell you: people want you to know.
Ok, rant over, I’m off to write an article on how people are going to judge you now that they know your child is an honors student, or that you <3 your dog. Bumper stickers give out way too much personal information!
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
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