One of the most important dynamics of public life is that we engage in it voluntarily. But it is only voluntary if the individual can choose when and how to interact in public. Americans believe we have a Constitutional right to privacy.
We accepted the Patriot Act after 9/11, because we were promised it would be applied judiciously and with respect to personal privacy and constitutional rights. The Snowden disclosures showed that: 1. The government IS spying on Americans in America, and 2. that spying is widespread.

Every time an elected official--including the President--assured us a specific limit was in place, a new disclosure would prove that wasn't true. First it was "only tracking foreigners" then "only tracking conversations with foreigners" then it was "only email." Now we know info is collected on almost every piece of data we put out on the internet, including data from our phone records that can trace our movements!

Inevitably, one or two government agencies morph into "the government." The corrosive effect of a small group of people an a couple of buildings in Virginia corrode the relationship between the public and the system.

The question no one wants to ask about this controversy is: how culpable is the public in its own loss of privacy? How naive are we about the personal costs of the societal demands we make to be safe, secure, mobile and inconvenienced? And more to the point here, have much of our shock at the nature of the relationship between social media and privacy is the result of our own laziness in teaching our ourselves how the technology in which we immerse ourselves actually works?

The internet like every other human network of interaction is about trade. You get in value roughly what you give or the structure falls apart. The internet was originally created to facilitate correspondence, but once the World Wide Web was laid over it and it was easy to navigate, it inevitably became a marketplace.

But what happens to a marketplace where people think everything is free? Why buy music and movies when you can pirate them? Why pay for news when so many bloggers are willing to give it to you for the price of a "like?" Why buy stamps when Facebook can put you in 24 hour-a-day contact with dozens of people you know and thousands that you don't for nothing?

Anyone who really thinks that the internet is free is being at least a little self-delusional. Let clear it up for you. IF YOU AREN'T THE BUYER YOU'RE THE PRODUCT! This isn't new. Television doesn't sell cars and detergent. Television sells viewers. TV gets its money from advertisers. The stations earn their pay for delivering US to their ads. The internet is no different. Facebook is free for you, because Facebook is selling you!

I have four little words for you--words that anyone who wants to live online had better get used to: END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT (EULA). No legitimate web service can collect and sell information about your online life without your permission. You give them that permission when you scroll through all of those tiny little paragraphs that you pass when you create your login and hit Accept! Whenever the agreement changes, they have to tell you what those changes are, and we have to hit ACCEPT again. And we do...almost always without reading a single word.
To be fair, companies have their lawyers EULAs and make them as difficult to navigate and comprehend as they can. But still the end result is that they have our permission to do what they do. PRO TIP: volunteers online do a pretty good job of simplifying the EULAs of popular sites. Google Facebook EULA for instance and see what comes up.

I don't want to diminish the seriousness of the issue of covert government surveillance. However, if we don think they should do it, we can at least make it hard for them? Do you send personal, private correspondence on a post card, or do you stick it in an envelope so no one can see! By and large, your computer and ESPECIALLY your smart phone are post cards. We willingly broadcast our whereabouts. Some of us "check in" at locations to get digital Bragging rights. And we not only share our own information on Facebook, we share the info of our friends and all of their friends! (Check that EULA) if you are worried about maximizing your privacy, research ways to protect it. There are many, and most of them demand very little technical expertise.

I've been wrestling with this question for years. I'm a pretty private person. Like you, I consider privacy a fundamental right. But if I have the right to privacy, I also have the right to trade that privacy for the benefits accrued from a more open life. Amazing (and amazingly accurate) capabilities to send us where we want, help us find others like us, give us information we might not even know we want, even create "universal" language translations, come from users allowing our online patterns to be studied. We all know the benefits of privacy. On the next slide, I am going to list some reasons for thinking about a more public life online.

You are never really you, because you are Broken down into thousands minor traits . Those traits are built into general models. Your personal quirks, oddities, bad habits, etc. get in the way of accurate models of general behavior. So there is little to be gained for trying to surveil EVERY person. Those little things can be combined into predictions that can be eerily accurate. But when you get a targeted ad for a VW the day after you looked at a VW, it's a statistical coincidence, not a conspiracy. After all, we are each unique but our similarities dwarf our differences.
You have a 1 in 14,000,000 chance of winning the powerball. You have a 1 in 315,000,000 chance of being singled out by the NSA (unless you're, you know, guilty). YES, groups are profiled, but if you are in that group and completely "off the grid" you will still fit the profile! There is a ratio of privacy/safety. We need to debate that ratio without demanding all-or-nothing solutions to fluid problems.