The Island of Doubt

One of the best things about the Science Blogs collective is that so little of what gets posted concerns the mundane and prosaic details of the authors' lives. We write substantial, serious stuff, posts that deal with public figures and weighty issues. No what-I-had-for-breakfast claptrap for us, no siree.

So I didn't think twice when my wife and I set up a separate blog to detail, for the benefit of our friends and family, her pregnancy and the subsequent birth of our first child. Neither did I give any thought to the ethical implications of another incarnation of that blog, one dedicated to sharing all the little details of little Aidan's young life. So comfortable with blogging had I become. But this morning, all that changed as I lay awake after a moderately successful night's sleep.

Our son's blog (and no, I'm not going to share the URL, for reasons that should quickly become clear) is not like a Science Blog. It contains what anyone from my generation would consider intimate and private information. It's all the kind of thing one shares in telephone and in person, with friends and family -- from how much the tyke weighs on the one-month anniversary of his birth to descriptions of medical treatments -- but posted on the Internet for the entire planet to see. We did try to restrict access to his blog to invitees only, but the new protocols implemented in the past few weeks by the overlords at Blogger are nearly impossible to navigate, putting anyone without a degree in systems engineering at a severe disadvantage. So we reluctantly switched back to open-access.

Not that anyone other than family and a few select friends gives a dingo's kidney about how much my son weighs. But the point is, we never stopped to consider if this kind of blog doesn't represent a violation of his privacy.

I strongly suspect that my son's generation will grow up never knowing what real privacy is all about. His cohorts will never know a world with the Internet or whatever replaces it. (Global neural interface?) He may laugh at the notion that we violated his civil rights by letting everyone know about certain events during the early months of his life, during which he didn't even have a full developed sense of self.

But that's not the point. Not so long ago, I also suspect, what we're doing now would almost certainly have been considered ethically questionable. Just 10 or 20 years ago, the difference between telling your sister-in-law about your offspring's breastfeeding habits and publishing the same information on a global platform would have been obvious. And to those of us who grew up in those days, the difference remains.

But thanks to myspace and facebook or whatever social-networking site is currently in vogue, today's kids think nothing of sharing even embarrassing anecdotes with the world. Some of discovering that discretion actually serves a purpose, as they enter the job market and realize that their potential employers aren't so out of touch that they don't know what Google can do. But by and large their new and strange approach to privacy seems to remain largely unaffected.

It's a great example of how technology changes human behaviour. A recent feature in New Scientist (subscription only) entitled "Living Online: The End of Privacy." asks: "Will the 'MySpace generation; live to regret it?"

Many people reveal everything from their musical tastes and political and sexual orientation to their drinking and drug habits and their inner thoughts and feelings. And it's a very recent phenomenon. "There is no real-world parallel. You don't go walking round the mall telling people whether you are straight or gay," says Fred Stutzman, a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies identity and social networks.

There's a fascinating scenario described in SF author Robert Sawyer's Hominids-Humans-Hybrid SF novels, in which a Neanderthal society lives under perpetual surveillance with the help of artificial intelligence implants on their forearms. Everything they do is downloaded into a communal computer archive. In exchange, they eliminated violence. Essentially, it's the logical end result of the increasing prevalance of closed-circuit cameras here in the real world. They make those of us older than 40 nervous. Except of course, for the guinea pigs in England and elsewhere who have seen the benefits in the form of dramatically lower crime rates for the past few year.

So are we approaching the End of Privacy? Will my son even care? Is worrying about the ethics of a private blog a sign we're no longer with the program?