Michael Gerson reports:
Just weeks after the Supreme Court took a landmark case featuring a demand for greater communication privacy, many took to Facebook to reveal the color of the bra they were wearing. In a breast cancer awareness effort, women (mostly women, I assume) updated their profiles with words such as “black,” “leopard” or (interestingly) “camouflage.”
It is the paradox of the cyber era: A nation of exhibitionists demanding privacy.
Read more in the Washington Post.
As a privacy advocate, some days I wonder whether I have failed totally to instill guardianship of privacy in one of my children. While my elder child “gets it” and is cautious online, my younger child occasionally looks at me sideways and wonders aloud whether I might be paranoid at all. Cautions about how her online postings could come back to bite her some day in her career fall on relatively deaf ears and she didn’t hesitate to participate in the breast cancer awareness campaign that Gerson describes in his article.
Maybe the paradox is not that a nation of exhibitionists demands privacy. Maybe we are just two very different generational cultures sharing the same nation.