Invading Our Own Privacy

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It's tempting to write off those darn kids as narcissistic or obsessed with fame, as Lakshmi Chaudhry does in the Nation (Jan. 29, 2007). After all, as she points out, 'Celebrity has become a commodity in itself, detached from and more valuable than wealth or achievement.' What's received little attention, though, is the ways corporations are stacking the digital deck.

'Young people are now heavily engaged in identity exploration and development well into their 20s, and the Internet has become their primary tool,' says Kathryn Montgomery, professor of communications at American University and author of Generation Digital (MIT Press, 2007). 'Companies build brands by purposely cultivating this process, creating spaces where they're encouraging people to pour their hearts out. It's like a diary -- but there's no key.'

On February 22, ClickZ.com reported that Fox Interactive Media, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which owns MySpace, had hired a high-tech ad firm to mine user profiles, blog posts, and bulletins to 'allow for highly refined audience segmentation and contextual microtargeting . . . which might put it in more direct competition with the likes of Yahoo, AOL, and MSN.'

'I don't think kids understand the long-term consequences of our surveillance culture. I'm not sure any of us do,' Montgomery says. 'But it's the responsibility of educators and policy makers to make sure we're educating people about the value of privacy and what it really means to give it up.'

In that spirit, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 12, 2007), two professors at Drake University's law school, worried that their students' casual approach to digital correspondence could hinder their careers, started a class stressing online discretion. The lesson, according to one student, is simple: 'If you are not comfortable with shouting your comments from a street corner, you probably shouldn't convey them via electronic print.'

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