Normal people are used to having the luxury of being very open about almost every facet of their lives and not having to worry about it biting them. The privacy paranoids have largely been, well, paranoid. This has been changing over the past decade or so, but most people still don't believe it. Not really. Apps like this will change public perception, and have a backlash against permissive default privacy policies. At least I hope so.

Big data and user profiling is a somewhat recent trend, if you consider the age of the internet. It used to be that free web services merely showed you ads, and people got used to that. I don't think most of them have realized just by what order of magnitude things have escalated, how much information they are making public outside the immediate app and connected friends and how they have become a product for these enterprises to sell.

I would say that most users of these kind of applications do not even dream of the consequences of the combination of the data the make available. It needs geek mentality and more algorithmic thinking then you would expect to realize this.

You could even try to reconstruct foursquare locations of people who are not on FS just by their FB buddies ... try to explain that to "normal people".

And isn't it a bit scary that you seem to need more and more caution as time goes by? Would we need more responsibility on the side of the makers or do we keep blaming "normal people" for the world we create? (like we do it with, let's say, their inability to maintain secure passwords?)

The concept of a public lifestyle does exist, and I'd say it's a good sign that people do not live in constant fear of their neighbours.

The thing is, this is the Internet. Everyone is your neighbor.

And you raise a false dichotomy. Just because someone wants to exercise their right to privacy does not imply one is in "constant fear" of others.

I was using neighbour to refer to the concept of the fellow (wo)man. I did not mean to insinuate that people who have concerns over privacy live in fear. Personally, for me, I would more enjoy living in a society where some people are comfortable publicly sharing their identity.

But your solution stops being effective at the slightest loss of control of the data. Also, you can't control other people who might get access to it.

How does your public identity being tied to your "real self" helps you if some random person decides to break into your house? How would you feel if people you don't even know started shouting "Happy Birthday" to you on your birthday? How would you feel if those same people started talking about those genital warts you had to treat two years ago?

People will be comfortable sharing anything (identities, actions, personality traits) as long as they feel they have control over who gets access to what is being shared. I fail to see how anyone would feel comfortable sharing everything to everyone.

I'd say the examples I gave are far, far from any logical extreme. TFA mentions how just by crossing two (apparently) disparate networks, you get people potentially being harassed by complete strangers.

All I'm trying to say is that I don't see how to reconcile the idea of having a "public lifestyle" (i.e, let personal information be freely available to anyone that bothers to go look for it) and being able to have a controlled disclosure of personal data.

Well in my view, "sharing everything with everyone" reaches a vertex on the continuum. Clearly I'm not putting stuff out there that I wouldn't tell to, say, an acquaintance I met at a party.

You raised concerns over someone breaking into my house. I believe we want to stay away from the "you should be afraid of people" argument.

So I suppose your concern is that I would rather some information I leak out remain private. Sure. So what? Then you have to worry about things that you wouldn't want an acquaintance at a party to know. What are those things, how would they get online, how often, and what would the impact be? It's better just not to worry in my opinion, instead of running around putting out fires when a friend of yours on Facebook or Twitter publicly posts that it's your birthday.

I guess we are talking about different things. If you are analyzing what it is what you disclose, and the consequences of it being out in the open, the impact etc... then it's no longer a "public lifestyle", it's just that you feel comfortable putting some information online when other people don't. There is no argument to be made.

But the whole point about the OP that started this discussion of ours was not about information that people are comfortable to share with people they trust. It's about how people not realizing about the information leaking to people they don't know. You seem to dismiss that with the idea that it's a false sense of security. We could argue about that, but it's besides the point.

What I wanted to point out is that it's not just about security. It's about trust. And trust does not with blacklisting post-facto. It works by whitelisting prior known people. The people who got surprised by discovering they were visible on some creepy website had to learn that the hard way.

That seems kind of silly. I don't understand why people who normally act cold, uncaring, and distant in-person (basically: most Americans) suddenly want to be as up-close and in-your-face as possible online.

I'm going to make a statistical assumption that you're a male. Consider the different reactions the original article (http://www.cultofmac.com/157641/this-creepy-app-isnt-just-st...) describes from the men and women who saw the app, and why that would be the case.

In "real life", all I have to do is take a quick glance at the people around me, and I'll get an impression of how "safe" the personal information is that I'm sharing. It's a lot harder on the internet! Especially on Facebook, when you feel like you're talking to friends, it's hard to remember that the whole internet is listening.

Because rationality is a myth; we are mammals with language skills. Evolution has taught us that only things in the here and now can hurt us, and decisions we made (or really, failed to make by accepting defaults) last year are harmless.

Psychologists found a while ago that people are more open and less inhibited when technology mediates their interactions with other people. This same effect probably carries over to providing personal data to online services. Somehow it doesn't quite feel like sharing with the world when you are only making an update on your phone.

The average user doesn't think about edge cases when using new internet services.