Privacy 2.0

[Skybird]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8446649.stm

If you look at privacy in law, one important concept is a reasonable expectation of privacy,"
(...)
"When our reasonable expectations diminish, as they have, by necessity our legal protection diminishes."

Even more, a social anonymous pressure or expectation arises that demands people to be not protective about their privacy and expects them to give it up easily. People even can lose a sense for why they should want to protect their privacy.

Long time ago, when I was in my training to become a psychotherapist, I made repeated experiences with group settings in training groups, and the group pressure being applied - of course only with the best of intentions, always! - to make the individual confessing something of a most intimiate nature, because "all others have done it, too". You were expected to tell a bunch of strangers, whom you met every three weeks, something of your intimate, private sphere, and you were put under pressure to believe that this is for the social good of all. You can imagine that it was a fight me against everybody else. I can be stubborn on these things, and then really enjoy multi-front wars. It ended with me routinely being considered a socially malfunction being that needed therapy and is in danger to develope a truly antisocial personality. to the criticism I fired back, I almost never got qualified replies. Psychotherapists can be VERY dogmatic people.

Short time before I decided to give up psychology and psychotherapy completely (this psychobabbling being on of three major reasons), I started to have fun by mimicing Worf's behavior in these training groups and confronting individuals very much in his way: a mixture of not taking them seriously, and directness. My fun was great, their confusion and lacking understanding not less. They must have been happy when they had gotten rid of me.

I see group pressure forming subcultures and having tremendous influence also amongst teenagers and juveniles, and at school. I think the BBC article has a very valid point therefore, also regarding the drive in security laws we have seen since 1.) the digitalisation of life in the modern world, and 2.) 9/11.

While I see the potential of modern electronics and digital data processing making things better for man, I see no rule-making party, no lobby and no faction indicating that they would handle this tool responsibly and sensitve and carefully. I assume all these parties to abuse these tools to their best personal powerpolitical interest. That's why I question these tools, and the immense cultural change they bring to the social reality in our societies. It are tools our society does not seem to have the ripeness to handle.