Some areas are not as clear cut as credit cards (obviously private) or complaining about your boss on your blog (obviously not). Here are just a few of the gray areas:
I used to consider my emails private. (At least from my private account - most people I know don't use their work account for sensitive business. Not a great idea if they do - one funny example is seen in an episode of NBC's the Office called Email Surveillance.)
Then I got a google account and noticed that all the ads were related to text in the body of my email. I even wrote back and forth with a friend to see if we could bring up ads about the Smurfs. (We could.) That convinced me that really, the contents of my emails are not fully private. If I have a private conversation with my husband, it's pretty unlikely that anyone would could possibly care would find that information, but we never send information that might be exploitable by a stranger.
Another alarming move was facebook's attempt to retain permanent rights to use, modify, etc. anything you post online (subject to your privacy settings). This change was reversed, and facebook argued that it was just trying to protect itself seeing that some of your posted information could end up "on servers out of its control." The language of the Terms of Service, as seen in this important consumerist.com post, is not unusual for social networking sites and reads like one of those waivers you have to sign before you bungee jump that basically says that anything that happens is your fault, or at least not the company's.
So, the ultimate lessons we need to convey to our students are 1) There is little privacy online, 2) how to keep things private and protected will continually change and you need take responsibility and keep up with those changes, and 3) that's no reason to avoid being online, it's just a reason to be educated and judicious. They're not easy lessons, but we'll do what we can.
Thanks for the photo of a google streetview car found through creative commons.
Your message to educators regarding what needs to be conveyed to students on the topic of online privacy nicely addresses the main ideas you bring up in your blog in three practical and easy to remember lessons. I would however restate the first lesson in discussing this topic with my students and say that 1) There is no privacy online (or no guarantee of privacy online) as the Internet is a public medium of communication.
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