Editorial from The Point:
Whether or not warnings about what Evgeny Morozov calls the “growing commodification of our personal data” turn out to have been warranted, recent history suggests we will continue to ignore them. As a society we seem to have made a decision—and not one we can claim was uninformed—to continue using Google, Facebook and Amazon, regardless of the uses they might be making of our personal emails, web searches and shopping histories. As has been often pointed out, recent revelations about the unprecedented (and sometimes illegal) information-gathering capabilities of internet companies, not to mention the U.S. government, have inspired a series of localized and academic protests, rather than (what might be expected, given the tenor of those protests) any kind of mass egress from the online portals where most of the spying is presumed to be taking place. Whatever the long-term risks of such activities, they have not struck most of us as severe enough to sacrifice, or even to seriously consider sacrificing, the conveniences of online commerce and communication.
That does not mean that we do not grapple every day with urgent privacy-related problems on the internet; we do. But the question we actually face in our daily lives is not how much personal or “private” information to share with Google, Facebook or Amazon—it is rather, and much more stressfully, how much of it to share with our friends.
More here.
