Eben Moglen on online privacy
October 3rd, 2007 | by Tim Wilson |Eben Moglen is a law professor at Columbia and Director of the Software Freedom Law Center. He is well-known in the free software world for his important work on the next generation of the GPL software license, the GPLv3.
Professor Moglen gave a talk last April at the MySQL Conference, and it’s worth a listen. Although online privacy seems like a quaint anachronism these days, Moglen paints an ornate picture of the inherent conflict between our desire for privacy and the appeal of an interconnected online world. Beyond the ideas he communicates, his 40-minute talk is a rhetorical work of art.
While the focus is on online privacy, Moglen got my attention when he took a short detour to comment on teenagers’ use of social networking sites:
I hear a lot of complaining from grownups, that is gray-haired altercockers like myself, about some supposed absence of concern for privacy among teenagers at MySpace and Facebook. This puzzles me very much. I hear complaints about teenage driving too, but complaints about teenage driving are always accompanied by a recognition that the kids are inexperienced and that as they grow up they should become better drivers. But the fact is that the adults I hear complaining about teenage disregard for privacy on MySpace and Facebook are the very people who are bringing about the primary privacy problem that I’m trying to talk about here. They’re not becoming better drivers. They’re just becoming better ignorers of the problem as time goes by. And as we begin longitudinally to study what young people do at MySpace and Facebook, it turns out they’re not all that unconscious about privacy after all. This may yet turn out to be primarily an old person’s problem.
This matches my experience. When I talk to young people about their online lives, they consistently express pretty sophisticated attitudes about online interactions. It will be interesting to see how the social networking debates change over time.
Tags: ebenmoglen, onlineprivacy
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