Two different takes on privacy in the 2.0 age.

• Teen Tests Internet's Lewd Track Record
  
  "Three weeks later, Stokke has decided that control is essentially beyond her grasp. Instead, she said, she has learned a distressing lesson in the unruly momentum of the Internet. A fan on a Cal football message board posted a picture of the attractive, athletic pole vaulter. A popular sports blogger in New York found the picture and posted it on his site. Dozens of other bloggers picked up the same image and spread it. Within days, hundreds of thousands of Internet users had searched for Stokke's picture and leered....

  'Even if none of it is illegal, it just all feels really demeaning,' Allison Stokke said. 'I worked so hard for pole vaulting and all this other stuff, and it's almost like that doesn't matter. Nobody sees that. Nobody really sees me.' " [Washington Post]



• Say Anything
  
  "...More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, 'Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture.'

  And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

  So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it." [New York]

Be sure to read that second article, as I think it's very eye-opening if you're over the age of about 40-45, just because it's such a different way of thinking. It's the total opposite of how I was raised.

Would the second article have helped with the first situation? Maybe. I'm starting to believe that part of a parent's role is to register their kids' names in various places just to prevent others from doing it. What would that entail, and how would you ever keep up? Can the public library help with education in this area? Right now, as a parent, I would register my child's name as a domain name (if it's still available) and in myspace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LiveJournal, Xanga, Bebo, the IM networks, and gmail. Sure your child will probably use an alias anyway, but it's kind of preventative identity theft.

Maybe adults should be doing this, too.