Seems like the Americans are really waking up now. The New York Times ran a story today on the terrifying news that anybody can find out virtually anything about you online all of a sudden! If they’d only had read a book called Nextopia (or followed this blog), they would have known about blogarazzi-bummer (the fact that in this day and age, we are our own worst paparazzi, digging deep into all our dirty secrets and exposing them for the world to see) a long time ago.

Here’s what the New York Times asks: “If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?” And what they conclude is that, well, this is basically what we do online.

OK, to the good people at the NYT, and the rest of America(?), here’s the story.

First, there’s a thing called the truth of porn, which means that the more we reveal, the less naked we feel. In other words, in the beginning, we might feel really anxious to leave private information on facebook, on blogs, microblogs etc. But after a while, our fingers start to slip, revealing just a little more than we first thought proper, and after the first slip, the cat’s out of the bag. The more we reveal, the less personal it feels, and so we gradually (shockingly quickly) move our boundaries of privacy and “integrity”.

Second, most people’s concept of information is still stuck in the yestermillennium, when “real” information was info that formed a coherent unit, deliberately spread and deliberately gathered. Because in the yestermillennium, there was no world of any, where anyone could communicate with the rest of the world, anytime, anywhere, within a microsecond. Hence, no one thought it worth the while to consider small, incoherent, bits and pieces of info as “real” information. But now we live in the world of any, where anyone, anywhere, can send messages to the rest of the world in a microsecond, regardless of how miniscule and unimportant the info, and in the next microsecond, anyone, anywhere can pick all kinds of bits and pieces together from anywhere, anytime. 

Which explains the NYT report that students at MIT found that they could predict with 78 percent accuracy whether a person was gay just by accessing their facebook profile (and put two and two together based on status updates, listed friends, wall messages, etc.)

It also explains how researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to come across the full, nine-digit social security numbers of almost 10 percent of all Americans. Just by putting together all those slips of the truth of porn.

Blogarazzi-bummer, America!