Internet Privacy: How to Hide and What the Stakes Are:

The world owes AOL a big thanks for its data privacy breach because it�s becoming clear that nothing you do on the Internet is anonymous, a basic fact of the digital era that few people really understand. The New York Times has two worthwhile pieces today on the issue of Internet privacy, the first of which provides practical advice on how to keep your net activities private.

Read the NYTimes piece: “Your Life as an Open Book”.

It’s not your IP address that identifies you. Tools like those mentioned in “How to Digitally Hide” only help so much. It’s what you share. No matter how anonymous you think you may be.

Possibly now, a real discussion can take place about our new social realm, what danah boyd calls “the super public”, one that remembers everything, for everyone, for all of time:

…Persistence, searchability, the collapse of distance and time, copyability… These are not factors that most everyday people consider when living unmediated lives. Yet, they are increasingly becoming normative in society. Throughout the 20th century, mass media forced journalists and “public” figures to come to terms with this, but digital structures force everyone to do so. People’s notion of public radically changes when they have to account for the Kenyan farmer, their lurking boss, and the person who will access their speech months from now. People’s idea of a public is traditionally bounded by space, time and audience – the park is a public that people understand. And, yet, this is all being disrupted.