Tim blogged about the transparent society a few weeks ago (Suburban Mom Embraces The Surveillance Society and whocalled.us), and as so often before the blogosphere seems to hit a hivemind. During the last 48 hours several interesting stories have popped up — from Danish health survey mashups to sex baiting. Linkfest ahead:
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Waxy’s account of a social experiment carried out recently on Craigslist. The story involves Jason Fortuny, a web designer, who decided to 1) post a fake request on craigslist, posing as a submissive woman looking for dominant men, and then 2) publishing all the responses he got online. Many of the respondents used their real names and gave out other personal information making them identifiable.
(Waxy’s post is entirely sex free and SFW. He warns you when linking into NSFW territory.) - Findvej.dk/smiley is Google Maps mashup of restaurant and supermarket sanitary code violations for Frederiksberg, a suburb of Copenhagen. The smiley system used is a somewhat annoying – if charmingly simple – Danish government standard for health code status. (Nb. Don’t buy milk at Elite Supermarket when you’re in Copenhagen for reboot come next June)
- Quite alarmist reporting in this one, but nonetheless – can and should Apple track stolen iPods?
- Facebook users are unhappy about a new “personal feed” feature of the social network based on the sentiment that this isn’t networking, but stalking.
It seems as if each of these privacy and surveillance stories are able to put a different spin on surveillance and privacy, indicating perhaps that it is already the case that the ethics aren’t really tied to privacy and surveillance as such but just to each individual’s use of all of this data in the specific situation.