Posted 1 year ago
Location, Calibration
After reading this piece by MG Siegler about the new Places feature on Facebook, I was actually caught in the middle. I haven’t passed judgement yet on the service — and I may not.
As someone who is both fascinated and horrified by the concerns that get brought up about privacy, I must admit to the shock of not being absolutely turned off by the notion of sharing location. I have personal reasons for not having wanted to use Gowalla, Foursquare, or any of these types of services, not having to do much with privacy — not fear for my safety at least, just not wanting to share the information.
Even so, MG does a nice job of examining the situation that we find ourselves in as citizens of the Internet and the Universe at large in 2010 A.D. with regard to this type of phenomenon. He points out that the ACLU was quick to fire their gun, and the EFF was not a slow draw themselves. Granted, these were unsurprising, it speaks to the attitude that some have about the internet, privacy, networks, and the issues surrounding these things.
I think I had gotten sucked into the cynical part of the conversation.
While I still think skepticism is very healthy when it comes to these new territories, it’s less useful when not taken in context for each case. Rather than assume there are issues despite the potential, maybe we’d be better off seeing the potential something has despite its issues. This is not to say I nor anyone should be lax about the very real concern of privacy, security, and possible harm these services present, but to take an even keeled approach to the matter — weigh each service and feature on its own, using a balanced scale which gets calibrated from time to time.
That’s what I’m going to do. You just witnessed a calibration of my scale.
