Privacy on the web
Elizabeth Rader has a quick little blurb today about how we’ll need to rethink what “privacy” means when everything we’ve ever written is available on the web. (A quick check shows that there are something like 1,144 posts within this here blog, and that excludes some that disappeared when I made the switch to Blosxom.)
There’s a lot to say here, but perhaps it suffices to point people to Richard Posner’s eye-opening comments on the idea of privacy; I believe I read them within either The Economics of Justice or Frontiers of Legal Theory. Part of Posner’s point is that there’s really no good reason — from a society’s perspective — for people to withhold damaging facts about themselves. The argument is subtle, challenging, and not entirely convincing, but I’d encourage you to read Posner’s books. They’re a fantastic contrarian look at common sense.