Nisadas

So recently I get a photograph in my mail of President Barack Obama checking out a young lady’s behind. While I’d normally shrug this off as instinct getting the better of the man, a friend also sends me the link where the situation behind it all is cleared through a youtube video, which proves Sarkozy to be a true frenchman.

Okay, so it’s old news but you can check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbifTbJtgJA.

Seeing world leaders’ little indiscretions caught on tape for the world to see reminded me of a good friend of mine doing a (impromptu and with only a little egging on by the compere) funky dance right out of an American Pie kinda movie on stage at an Interact function many years ago. No cameras (in phones or otherwise) to record this strange occurence or the shocked fascination of the crowd; just human memory in all its fallibility to carry those images for posterity, to be brought up at get-togethers and laughed about.

Nowadays, you can bet that any incident of that nature will be recorded and found on a social network. With any luck, the poor soul will end up tagged and watched by millions of people who never knew he existed until they saw the video.

This simply means that today, we need to be far more careful about what we say and do; especially the moments of spontaneous craziness (see the part about the Star Wars Kid in the article at Scientific American on social networks and privacy).

This point was driven home extra hard when I took part in a training recently. When the guy doing the training pointed out that my Outlook calendar was easily visible to my superiors at office – something that I understood was possible, but something that I never really thought about. I got a little bothered about this and asked him “Where’s the privacy in that?”

The response was simple – “What privacy? Your system adminstrators have full access to the information on your computer – you just need to make sure that you don’t do anything unnecessary with it.”

And then it struck me – all those personal details on Facebook? All those emails in my “personal” mailboxes hosted by big “free email” companies? Just how private are those emails? Or my events in Google Calendar?

The main argument presented in this case is that “Good people have nothing to hide”. But what if I’m just a private person? Okay, not so private that I blog under my real name, but private in the sense that I like having control of how much information about myself is revealed?

There are so many facebook photos that get saved on to folders and forwarded via email that you might wonder if being in touch is worth the price. It just means that you have to be careful about what the world sees. What used to be the private pain of celebrities the world over has now become a far more common problem. Sure, you can try and sue the moron from the photo studio who decided to share all those interesting photos of your girlfriends off your digital camera with his friends, but how do you intend on proving it?

It seems that privacy as we used to know it died quite sometime ago, around the same time that it became possible to fish out old “personal” emails and forward them to people who weren’t in the loop. All that can be done now is to watch your step – and hope that if anything about you is on the net, you know about it.