P-R-I-V-A-S-E-E?

It’s a word I have dismissed from my vocabulary (and now, apparently, my spelling as well). It’s a subject that crops up every once in a while. This past week I caught a FB status update of a friend of mine. She mentioned that she’s getting ready to read the Privacy Act, she actually followed ‘Privacy Act’ with ‘2001′, which is good because I was thinking ‘Isn’t that a Tom Clancy book’? The comments following her post quickly cleared up that silliness (I’m quite the spy/action book reader, truth be told) and I moved on. Almost within the same surfing breath, I came across an interesting piece on expectation of privacy.

The post quotes and comments on Google, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt’s ideas and beliefs on privacy, and FB. There’s some pretty interesting stuff in there. For me, I’m not so young that I don’t recall a life pre-internet and ‘letting my stuff all hang out’ (virtually speaking), but I’m not so old that I freak out every time I happen to search something on Google or order something online. There is something Eric Schmidt says that speaks to people like me: ‘”If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”…I don’t have any secrets. By design really. Well, not many of them. Of course, this comes from a girl who thought about doing a one woman comedy show on her love life. So I might not fall within the privacy-concerned median. Of course, there is something else he says, directly following that sends just a little shiver up my occasional-downloaded-pirated-movie self: “But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.”

It’s an interesting read. Thought provoking?