Gmail users are bloggers (but don’t know about it)
This has been a very interesting comment in one of the key notes at ECIS 2007. However, it is not quite true. It should be:
Gmail users are bloggers (but don’t care about it).
What does that mean? People are trading the content of their emails for a free 2 GB mail account with a nice GUI. And no one is educating them about the potential consequences.
The overall topic of the key note was the future of the internet and how it will affect our life. So let’s think about it. Google has extended the gmail-kind-of-service for photo (picasa), videos (youtube), telephony (talk), social networks (orkut) and so on and so on.
So we are already publishing almost every digitzed content of our life to companies like google. But is it an actual problem? After all the motto of Google is “Do not be evil”. So it is about trust, then. Do we trust our emerging “big brother” in the internet? Do we like the idea that he knows our holiday photos, our social network, the content of our emails, etc. …? Can we do anything about it?
Again, it is a trade-off between losing privacy and getting a comfortable (and free) digital life. But not every aspect of this trade-off is clear to anybody (including myself, I admit):
What does it mean to lose privacy? Is it a problem at all? When will it become a problem?
Hmm… have to think about it.
