Friday 3 April 2009

O Brave New World

I blogged recently about a Digital Media lecture on social networking I went to - and asked for your responses to the new social formations promised by the information age. One of the participants has certainly responded to our suggestions that social-networking trains us to surrender personal information to any authority, commercial and public: the gentleman behind Unluckydip.com is closing down many of his accounts.

If you're bothered, matey, read this: 'Facebook users unwittingly reveal details' and this: 'Mobiles could spell the end of privacy': basically, Google et al. are tempting you to run location-sensitive applications - so that they (and whoever is tapping in to your account) and all the world's advertisers, know where you are for the rest of your life.

On the other hand, if you think technology can be fun, you'd be right. You can now use free Guardian APIs to do odd stuff, and one fan has tracked the history and characteristics of swearing in the Guardian. According to the graph, 'wank' is much underused. To the comment boards!

1 comment:

Theunluckydip said...

I have looked over the articles you link to and I was well aware of issues raised in both, nevertheless they were both worth linking to.

Interestingly, come to mention location sensitive applications, I've heard on a tech savvy/political podcast that I listen to called "No Agenda" that even after deleting Google's latitude application on the G1 phone it continues to run in the background until the phone is completely reformatted. I tried to find an article on the matter but couldn't find anything, true or not, it's certainly believable.

Ultimately, the most important thing regarding technology; and anything for that matter, is just to be aware of any risk, but to not get too paranoid about it. I'm not deleting accounts out of any "fear" over privacy, if that were the case I wouldn't use the internet at all and would be swiftly constructing a faraday cage to live in!