According to TechRadar, Mark Zuckerberg says that people are more willing to share personal information than ever before, and the amount they share online will continue to grow exponentially. He even mentioned that that there may be a “historical analogy [to] Moore’s Law“.
It’s interesting to see this play out on Facebook. While it’s clear that society as a whole is trending towards transparency (at an exponential pace), it’s not as obvious that personal information follows the same trend.
My interpretation has long been that people will continue to trade personal privacy for tools and services that add value to their lives. Whether it’s a location-based social network that might make navigation easier, or Facebook status updates that serve as a personal marketing tool, when an application provides more value than the privacy of the information underlying it, people will relinquish that information.
The question is whether this exponential growth in personal openness will continue to be controlled by each of us individually, or whether we will ultimately voluntarily relinquish control in favor of additional value to be gained by doing so. If I invented a technology that could locate, and continuously track in real time, every pedophile without their permission, would we as a society accept this tool? What about a tool that functioned as a Yelp for potential boyfriends or girlfriends? Is this new guy going to cheat? See what his previous girlfriends had to say.
At the end of the day, society as a whole will function like the individuals that comprise it. When and where the value provided to society exceeds the costs to the individual, we will support the voluntary and sometimes involuntary releases of private information.
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