Duncan Riley former editor of The Blog Herald starts an interesting conversation over at TechCrunch with a post entitled Should There Be A Privacy Line with Life Streaming. Life streaming is basically microblogging and sharing of lots of personal data with just about everyone using tools like Twitter,Tumbler,Jaiku, and Facebook.
My simple answer to the privacy debate is YES we all need it.
In the past I’ve had people send me death threats via email and I’m not inclined to have my personal tweets, facebook messages shared with the world. So I keep it private. However just like that I create ‘profiles’ for each site I’m involved with and create ‘social streams’ of data that are publicly accessible and are relevant for each site. So I protect personal privacy while still being apart of the active conversation.
An example of that would be The Blog Herald’s new Twitter Feed http://www.twitter.com/blogherald, it’s not meant to be a personal twitter its meant to be relevant and on topic to share blogging related content to people interested in this niche not be a stream of my personal life. No one really wants to know I spent $10.22 on Chinese today at lunch with my friend and her family and her son threw up on me afterwords, and I really don’t want the universe knowing this information all the time either.
However my friends can access my Twitter Feed, people I know, and care about and am in business with. This is totally acceptable. But the public masses. They are free to get to know me better and network with me through less intrusive ways.
So in a nutshell, I think Duncan is spot on.
