Is it shallow of me that this current swing away from facebook makes me smile?

In particular, I read Deek's blog and felt a quiet internal fist punch the air whilst whisper-shouting "YES!"

I can't help but think it's all still too late for those that did have an account and have now deleted, as they have already signed away the rights to have their name extracted from wherever it may exist online. It is interesting that they say they reserve the right to extract your details from off line sources as well.. Are there any of those places left?

Years ago I remember seeing an exhibition in New York from an artist (sorry can't remember his name) who had patented the DNA from a select few of his friends. A painter, a sculptor and so on. He stated that with this new ownership he now possessed their individual artistic merits.

Obviously it was a statement against the use of DNA databases, but with the human gnome now technically being 'open source' If we can't own the right to our physical being, how on earth can we expect to keep a hold of the personal details of our life? It's as if by joining facebook we too have signed a copy of the Bermuda Principles.

There are those that would argue that a totally transparent society is the way to go. With DNA for scientific medial reasons I would have to agree making it 'open source' can do nothing but help us find all kinds of cures. But for our personal lives, (or whatever is left of them) rubbish.

Privacy helps us as individuals maintain our autonomy and individuality. We define ourselves by exercising power over our personal information.

Not to mention the functional benefits too. It protects our identities, not just from identity theft but also from repercussions for our political and religious beliefs. The Nazis found ID cards very helpful when it came to rounding people up.
I wrote a little in 'The Perfect Prison' about what happens to our minds and how we begin to behave when our privacy is slowly taken away from us.
I used to think that my home was a 'private' place but when I spend 70% of my waking hours online how much privacy do I think I really have.
Check out this short film on who's watching you..
There are not many 'private' places left. And now that policing has been brought right into out home.. do you have anywhere private to go?

Tags: social networking, facebook, surveillance, privacy, press, data mining, Deek Deekster, DNA

The Government needs YOU to start blogging now! Think about it. At this moment in time, those that run society have a few tools at their disposal to monitor the populous. Whether it be RFiD chips, CCTV, or Menwith hill and it's technological wonders. The private life of the individual is secretly captured, mapped, collected, and owned in effigy by a mass of private business operations—the security industry.

All these methods of collection require continued research and development, massive corporate and private funding and thousands of members of staff.

Wouldn't it be cheeper and easier for all if we publicly told the world exactly what we thought? What if we revealed our innermost fears and dreams in an attractive, easy to read, easily up-datable format?

Wouldn't this serve the government information gatherers just perfectly? All that time and energy saved.

Straight away, the chit chat from little girls discussing about what kind of tattoo/piercing/hair colour they are sporting this week can be filtered from the educated informed and ever so slightly angst ridden masses.

The technology is already in use to read every electronic transmission on the planet, it looks for keywords so the email or blog can be filed and read at a later date. But what the Blog really achieves is the effect it has on making people who really feel like they have an axe to grind, blab their innermost secrets to the world.

No more private conversations. Everything out in the public domain. The diary of a sociopath left open for all to see.

So now, thanks to the blog and all the loyal bloggers out there, the trouble causers and potential revolutionaries can be rounded up. In data bundles at first, name lists and hard drives crammed with tales of people, peoples tales and their anti social thoughts.
Then, in a more physical fashion as groups of people are isolated until they are brought into line.

Think about this next time you are posting your deepest darkest thoughts. Think about it but don't necessarily let it stop you.

Tags: blogging, cctv, surveillance, data mining