Darren Barefoot has some interesting thoughts about privacy in the internet age and the way in which today’s north american teenagers are growing up posting everything about their lives on the internet. Up till now, most of the discussion I’ve read on the subject has revolved around the effects on future careers of posting potentially embarrassing stuff on the web. Derek Miller points out that bosses will also have embarrassing stuff up on the web, although there will still be a generation gap there for some years until those future bosses become bosses (assuming that most bosses will still continue to be older than many of the people they employ).
We’re starting to discern the outlines of some likely effects of this now. For example, if I get an interesting email from someone I haven’t heard of, I’ll look them up in Google or Yahoo search, or LinkedIn. I don’t necessarily ignore the email if I don’t find any information about the person, but I can see that happening in the future — if you don’t exist in search engines, is that going to be considered weird?
Finding people I’ve lost touch with is getting easier every year, as long as they haven’t changed their name. I’ve managed to track down old friends, and others (who did change their name after marriage) have managed to track me down. Mind you, I’m relatively easy to find.
One effect I’m wondering about is on politicians: currently politicians either have to be squeaky clean, or good at hiding things the electorate might not like to hear about. Rudy Giuliani’s personal life includes three marriages and gay friends, all well-documented; in previous years this would have made a presidential campaign basically impossible. Now it just makes it more difficult, or maybe it’s just discussed more; in future years when more information is available about everyone on the internet, and hiding these things is going to be impossible, will voters be more accepting?
One interesting aspect to this is how little information is available about Google’s founders — and more than a little ironic, given how easy they’ve made it to find information about other people. An article on Mother Jones, via Bruce Schneier, has more.
I’m hoping perhaps that changing notions of privacy mean that we’ll treat politicians as human beings, and spend more time evaluating their policies instead of their personal lives (I think that’s already more the case in Canada than in the U.S. anyway). It may also mean that coverups are harder, which is a good thing.
What increasing findability is going to mean is that each of us will have to try to define our own online persona (our mask, as Julie Leung would put it); otherwise it will be defined for us. In other words, if you’re “out there” with your own blog and online presence, which you control, that’s what people are likely to find first. If not, what does appear could be pretty random, and you might not like it.
There are more than a few companies that need to learn that lesson as well.