As a fan of social networks, but a fan that has a love/hate relationship with social networks, I have a lot of questions for people who might find this blog and want to talk about it. The main question is… why are you so willing to give up information to small, medium, and large corporations; but not so willing to interact with your government?
You see, people seem to think that their government is out to get them. I understand that they are the ones who do things like warrantless wiretaps, and no-knock entries into residences; but understand something about business. They do the same thing. If you buy something at a store, they know when, where, how often, where in the store. They know your diet, they estimate your consumption, they know your spending limit, and your tolerance for higher prices and lower quality. They then sell you on various other complementary products and services as well as share all of this information to friends and family [Partners in business endeavors].
It seems to me that people have, for the most part, moved away from their desire for personal space, or at least, it has contracted to the surface of an individuals skin. With books like the Technorati, which aims to explain where business is trending towards; quantification of the human condition, I am not really surprised that personal privacy is slowly being done away with.
Twitter, Facebook, Google, and various iPhone applications that ask for your current location, or track everything you do or say, are all examples of this drip, drip, drip of integrating personal existence into a giving [as my previous comment discusses] power and authority to a corporation that exploits it and calls it a successful business.
In the business sense, exploiting a resource is not a bad thing. A business does this regularly with any resource; people just don’t seem to realize it is their personal information that is the resource. 10 years ago, people never would have given up the same level of detail about their personal existence. Mint.com exists on the premise that people will give up the most crucial details with no anonymity [or social networking] but it is a highly successful all digital enterprise that is barely 3 years old. The openness that people exhibit online is just odd.