Gilbert L 梁敬暉

Last week, Holman Jenkins at Wallstreet Journal wrote about an interview with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt. The man in charge of Google commented on the mobile revolution, the future of newspapers, and privacy in the digital age. What caught my attention and raised others' eyebrows as well was his glaring suggestions about privacy:

"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.

Either Eric's words were taken out of context, or he hasn't thought too deeply about this "social thing." Here's what's wrong with his suggestion and where I think privacy is going.

First of all, changing your name to start a new life won't hide your identity. As we speak, better algorithms and data storage techniques are being developed to support searching people through facial features;  PicTriev demonstrates a bit of that. The technology is still immature at this point, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking it won't happen. In fact, a demo I saw recently convinced me that  before long, we will be able to whip out our cameras, take pictures of other people, and find their Facebook profiles in seconds. So much for "disowning youthful hijinks" by "chang[ing] his or her name"; I'm afraid we will need plastic surgeries to really change our identities.

(from Sofapizza)

At first glance, such conclusions are daunting. The truth is that everyone of us are slowly losing control of our information in this digital age. Nevertheless, diminishing privacy is not the end of the world. In return for our privacy is social transparency and integrity.

Take fidelity for example. It used to be that people can have multiple partners with little conflicts (e.g "She fell in love with him not knowing he is married!"). Now? Either Facebook relationship statuses give it away, or lusty wall posts belie the cheaters.

In the words of my California banker, "You work at Facebook? Damn it man. I meet these girls at bars and they write stuff on my wall, you know? I always delete them the moment they come up! If my girl sees that stuff, I'd be in deep trouble!"

(from FailBook)

Let's get back to this "hijinks" idea. When reports came out a year ago claiming that employers are looking at candidates' Facebook profiles, people freaked out. Many began untagging themselves from party photos, in fear that future employers might find them "unprofessional."

In the short term, hiding your drunk photos is probably not a bad idea. In the long run? Nobody will care. The truth is that almost everyone of us have unprofessional photos of ourselves. Unless you never drink, never dance, and never allow others to takes photos of you, there's an unprofessional picture of you out there. Everyone in my generation and forward have these photos online and employers (if they try hard enough) will find them easily. So are companies going to stop hiring young people because they look unprofessional?

At some point, employers will get used to seeing people's party photos - the same way grandparents got used to dyed hair and tattoos. Instead, employers will look to other telling signs that actually distinguish candidates.

Another fear people have about posting information online is: "Things will come back to haunt you years from now... with unforeseeable consequences!!!"

Society, after all, treats people's past mistakes unforgivingly. 

Or does it?

President Barack Obama openly admitted that he smoked weed when he was young. Does that make him any less electable?

Everybody makes mistakes. We know that. In fact, the younger we are, the more mistakes we make. Isn't the idea is to acknowledge these mistakes and learn from them?

What Mr. Schmidt suggested is that everyone will want to run away from their past. What I'm suggesting is the exact opposite: everyone will be forced to acknowledge their history. Like celebrities, we will be confronted with our mistakes. Because everyone have their mishaps, society will not judge us on our mistakes (unless they're truly horrifying by public standards); society will judge whether we've learned from our mistakes or what we've done to rectify our missteps.

Actually, I will take a step further: years from now, a lack of web presence will actually hurt you. That is, leaving your public album empty or keeping the number of tweets to a minimum will diminish your public image. It's already happening now: someone my age who doesn't have a Facebook account is deemed "a weirdo." In the future, what will we think of people who don't share any information online? Unreal? Suspicious? Untrustworthy?

What we're witnessing today is a social revolution. Like in every revolution, somebody will get hurt. At the end of this social revolution, however, people will be more open, more honest, and more accepting. Is the cost of our privacy worth it?

I think so.