Privacy on Web 2.0?

I've been fooling around with Flock and the way it integrates a variety of services around the Web. I've been a reluctant user of much that is Web 2.0 and have taken more than a while to get the point of Facebook.

Well, I ain't got it yet, but I spent the better part of last morning chatting online with an old and very dear friend, something that wouldn't have happened if we both hadn't been on Facebook. So I'm willing to give FB a second look and more time. (It's all your fault, Suzy.)

The one thing that strikes me is the approach to privacy that use of these services entails. More so because privacy advocates have been decrying much of what is happening in the world of the Web. Essentially, when you use Facebook or Delicious or Picasa or Shelfari or any of the myriad other such services, you're putting much of your personal life out there for the world to peer at and pore over.

Of course, if you blog (as I do occasionally, more for the fun of it than as serious commentary, or as a way to experiment with online tools - as this post is with Posterous), then you are making a conscious choice to go public with your thoughts. And when you update your status on FB you're doing pretty much the same. So how is FB different?

I think the difference lies in the, well, for want of a better word, the spontaneity of the way in which one yields up one's privacy. In a blog, you think about what you want to write and you can revise it and republish it and so on. On FB, you twitter (and that's another service I haven't cottoned onto yet) on about what appears to be inconsequential stuff but a lot more people are privy to it and a lot more of you is revealed than you might realise.

Which may not be an unmixed blessing. Food for a weightier philosophical discussion here.

Posted via email from the blog posterous