In your facebook
Privacy is changing rapidly and in ways we can barely comprehend. Will we live our lives differently, fearing that our everyday social contacts are going to wind up in some great database? How will the world change when group photos snapped at parties all turn into misleading edges in that permanent, all-encompassing social graph? Can society limit the abuse of personal information without resorting to Internet censorship that would violate the First Amendment?
Yes, already happening, and no.
(hat tip)
I work as an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own).
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.
This blog may also discuss some of my non-genome interests or, to paraphrase Dwight Yoakam, "Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, etc etc."
The header image comes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's multimedia performance piece, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome."
June 25th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Security researchers have long known that “security through obscurity” doesn’t work, and there’s no reason this should be any less true for personal information than for passwords. Instead of trying to hide from the net and bemoaning what little information inevitably shows up, embrace it and make sure that the information you want to show up is what shows up. Try a search for William Gunn, for example.