Public Private Binary
Okay a lot of older people I know view public and private life as a binary. I live on the internet so I don't. I kind of wanted to have this discussion with the Anthony Wiener thing but he and that situation kind of tarnished the intellectual discussion I wanted have. There was just way too much baggage there.
But here is a pretty black and and white case of what I was thinking.
While stuff on cloud accounts are on the internet and can be shared they are at least intended to be more or less a convenient place to store what would otherwise be private data.
As I was saying people of my parents generation view public and private as a binary
Allow me to digress for moment. On the internet and as a guy chasing internet media celebrity I've found the only way to stay sane is to live life by the following paradoxical axiom.
EVERYONE CAN SEE WHAT I POST BUT NOT EVERYONE WILL SEE WHAT I POST.
The internet gives me access to audiences I just don't have in real life. Half the time nobody knows what the hell I'm talking about and that can be a mental strain. But on the internet exists people who may get it and that's a beautiful thing. However I don't know that audience well enough to just send each and everyone of them a private email. Why would I? It's the internet everybody is a radio commentator, columnist, and stand-up comedian here. So instead I have to put that stuff in the public where everybody can see it in hopes that it will find and connect to an audience. But that's a risk. It's a risk that somebody who is apathetic to, or worse offended by it will see it.
I hate the idea that the solution to that problem is just to shut up and never put anything someone might be offended by out there. The great thing about the internet is that you can find anything, and if everybody was afraid that this or that person's sensibilities would be stepped on, the internet would be a much more boring, much less interesting and yes much less useful place.
You can say the same thing about television and any medium but I'm willing to give the uptight brigade that since the pool of television channels is smaller than the VASTNESS OF THE WEB the general audience should be considered a little more.
All of this has lead me to the principle that the internet should not be considered public in the same way television is, especially since different parts of it are locked.
It bugs me every time someone is fired for something they said on a personal Facebook account as if that personal account somehow represents or even affects the entire company.
We have to have both legal and social degrees of privateness.
There are a lot of folks going "Well these woman should have put these photos on the internet" but as most media reports have pointed out they put them in a very private place on the internet. And so that assertion seems ill suited for the situation.
The Miley Cyrus Scenario
The next discussion is a discussion that's been had a lot of the last few years so I won't dwell on it.
FEMALE SEXUALITY.
It exists. Deal with it.
Persona vs Person
Okay fine. Let's do the gender neutral version of the same discussion. But not really. Hollywood tends to have a Madonna/whore thing going on where society views almost every female celebrity through the good girl/bad girl lenses.
A lot of these women at least in public persona tended to fall on the "good girls" side of things and people can't seem to deal with the dissonance.
That isn't or at least shouldn't be their problem. All the same it's something they're going to have to deal with.
Like I said this isn't just a female problem it's why nobody watched the Majestic. But for them it also gets tangled up in sexual double standards. So a lot of people are coming to their defense against the stupid. But that's running up against what I consider another wholly valid discussion that needs to be had.
Cloud Storage Is Not the Same as Local Storage
Okay a crime has been perpetrated and you should never blame victims. That said I do hope this causes us to have a larger discussion. The cloud is a relatively new concept brought into being because of the availability of increased speed and more portable devices but up until now people have thought of the cloud as being analogous in most ways to local storage. And marketers wanted it that way.
I hate that commercial so much. Why am I sharing it!? Quick tangent remember when video game commercials were like, "Hey this game, it's fun. Play it. It's fun." This one is like 2 and half minutes before we get to anything involving the game, instead we get a bunch Seltzer and Friedberg style "parodies" that stopped being funny three years ago.
I'm not kidding.
It's still harmless compared to most of the stuff EA puts out these days.
Anyway back to our regularly scheduled programming.
A lot of the tech intelligentsia are using this case as way to discuss the ways cloud storage is less secure and less personal than local storage. That discussion needs to be had especially as the law catches up with the tech in the hope that it falls on the side of the angels instead of the men with the ear mics.
And the people who are saying that right now data in the cloud can be more easily hacked are not necessarily the same guys who are slut shamming... though some totally are.
That discussion needs to be had as behind the scenes companies are indemnifying themselves against liability and are also handing over data to law enforcement agencies without warrants.
You don't own your cloud data in the same way you own local data.
This is something people people need to know and need to talk about as we're having these legal battles right now.
Sure The Supreme Court ruled that cops can't look at your phone, but what's stopping them from pressuring Google into giving up emails and photos? And even without that if Google or in this case Apple gets hacked how responsible are they for damages?
All that stuff is iffy right now but soon it won't and like I said I want the angels to win.
Even apart from all the law stuff my main point in both the first and last sub topics is we need need to change how we view the internet and that's not going to happen over night. It's only going to happen by stopping, thinking, and talking. The rules of the game not only need to, but are changing and if we don't sit down and codify them all of us are going to be playing different sports where what I feel was a legal check puts me in the penalty box ref.
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