Privacy Is Dead?

Julian Sanchez isn't so sure:

It’s easy to look at all the information that comes up in a simple Google search for someone’s name and conclude that privacy is dead. But I think it’s at least as significant that the crucial first page of results is likely to consist of information that the individuals themselves have chosen to make public: Blogs, Facebook or MySpace profiles, Twitter accounts, Last.fm pages, YouTube channels.

A similar inquiry a generation ago surely would have been much more laborious and less fruitful, but it also would have consisted to a far greater extent of what others had to say about the target: gossip first and foremost, but perhaps also press mentions, official records, and so on. It’s not that such information is now less accessible, but for the average person, it’s pushed to the margin by what we’ve chosen to disclose. That’s not an unmixed blessingsome may feel as though this merely traps them in a kind of openness arms racebut neither is it the privacy death-spiral a purely quantitative analysis might suggest.