Your social media and blogs are Hyperpublic!

You might want to think that your online activity on Facebook is somewhat private as most of us may want to think. If you buy into the kind of privacy policy that says that by participating on social networking sites you have given up on privacy, then maybe you would say that your online activity is public.

Both of these characterizations are wrong. Your online activity is hyperpublic, it’s entirely novel, and right now you are the only one who can manage it effectively. But that will involve rethinking privacy and the nature of online spaces.

A recent article I read outlines a few of the ways that our privacy is being eroded online. The gist of the article is that even when you try to post anonymously, or try to remain silent about certain aspects of your life, say on Facebook or Twitter, you might be “outed” anyway. That’s because those freaks that use the tiny tidbits of information in your tweets, or on your friends’ blogs or Facebook pages, to predict things about you using their techniques. And they’re pretty good at it.

According to this they are pretty good at it predicting you and your lifestyle with 78% accuracy.

The idea that a person’s online activity is public carries a certain credibility. You post something on Facebook or tweet about something and many people see it. At first it might seem like shouting something out in a room filled with friends, or like joking about the politics in the country in a cafe', shouting about the state of the world.

At the same time you might think that your actions, despite being accessible to many people, are essentially private. You have selected your friends, and so have chosen to give that information only to particular individuals. Random computer scientists pointing their algorithms at your profile are violating your privacy, you might say.

It need not be this way, and ought not to be. Unless we start to understand exactly how public spaces differ from hyperpublic ones, we can expect to see more and more of the hyperpublic, and less of the public in our lives.

We would be wise to start thinking about how best to behave ourselves in a hyperpublic space, since it seems clear that though we may have misunderstood privacy, we have not yet given up on it.