PRIVACY: I've spent considerable time this year studying privacy at school, for my research job and for my own personal interest. I've spent the past several weeks reading numerous SCC judgments on the "reasonable expectation of privacy," a standard (if you can call it that) underlining a person's s. 8 Charter rights. I worked lengthy hours on a report about digital rights management technologies and the privacy concerns surrounding them. I've got a continuing project about health records and privacy. I'm all over privacy.
Which is why I have a Facebook dilemma. I've resisted thus far. I do not have an account, though I will admit to hypocrisy: When I came back from school, I logged on to AHC's account (with his permission) and nosed around. Found some people, sent a couple of messages and even re-connected with a couple of people from the past. Otherwise, it seems kind of freaky to post stuff for the world to see. I know you can fix your privacy settings, but I have concerns that there's insidiousness just below the surface and I don't want to get sucked into it.
This is mostly a problem right now because I am in Toronto and many of my friends are not. But many of them have FB accounts. It seems like one way to keep in touch. Scanning someone's FB page seems kind of like passing them in the hall, or chatting for a minute by the lockers after class.
In truth, I'm one of those people who thinks you can't really replace face time with a person. I'm against living online. It would drive me crazy in class that people would be posting on people's walls in the middle of class to people who were three rows away. Seriously, wait until after class and talk to the person! It's a whole confluence of elements in our culture, I think: our sharing culture (guilty! I have a blog!) and our soundbite culture (not exactly guilty, but I do have a past in journalism, contributing to the phenom), to name but two. Oh, and I should add our simulacrum culture, just to shout out to Killingsworth. [On a weird note, I just pulled out my Canadian Oxford to check the spelling of "simulacrum" and I opened it on exactly the right page.]
What to do?!
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