by Matt St. Amand

Created on: February 07, 2009

Certainly, George W. Bush, John Ashcroft and the original Dr. Strangelove, Admiral John Poindexter, had all but decreed that the general public dress in cellophane, submit to polygraph tests on every street corner and sign hourly loyalty oathes, but the thing I marvel at these days is the amount of "self surveillance" going on.

I immediately think of MySpace and Facebook, Photobucket, Flickr and YouTube, to name but a few. Under no forced system imposed by the government could you get the citizenry to login hourly and update their statuses and continually, perpetually upload the latest photographs of themselves. People are having fun with it. Great. I get that. And let's not even get started with the vast numbers of people whose hobby it is to post nude photos of themselves on the Internet and uploading video of themselves having sex, shooting guns, breaking laws and even committing suicide on live Webcam. As a Libertarian and a Fortean, I think people should be allowed to do what they want.

How does this self-surveillance affect the argument that our privacy is under attack by government, bureaucrats, telemarketers, spammers, identity thieves, voyeuristic neighbors, nosy mailmen, inquisitive plumbers and over-zealous shoe salesmen? I guess each person has the right to exploit themselves, and everyone has a different threshold on that count. So long as I consent to having my photograph taken while dressed as a gladiator sitting in a bath tub filled with garlic chip dip - and subsequently posted on Facebook, MySpace, Photobucket, Flickr, and shared on Digg.com or Reddit.com, or Mixx, Furl, Bebo or any of a hundred such Web sites - then all's well, my rights are intact; my dignity remains unblemished. But the moment the photo of me wearing an experimental Gouda cheese and pineapple leaf headdress goes live without my permission, my rights have been violated; my dignity in tatters.

So, it seems to boil down to: self-exploitation is freedom in motion, and nosy government and pushy, instrusive marketers are the face of fascism. I can live with that. As long as what's known about me in the public domain is what I've chosen to share, then fine. But the moment some bean-counter programming wizard figures out a way to measure my erroneous zones or my wants-and-needs based upon the e-mail I send or the Web searches I perform, the feeling of violation has ignition.

The million dollar question is "How do I know/monitor/control the ways in which the information about myself I've freely allowed into the public ether is being used?"

The answer is, I do not.

The governmental voyeurs and tabloid panty-sniffers are not as open and self-revealing as the person on Facebook who updates her status as often as the hues in a mood ring change. They are not as willing to share as the guy who commits suicide on Webcam.

So, in a society that's becoming increasingly, exponentially exhibitionist, are the legitimate cries about violation of privacy being swept away by the cross current?

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