If you want to be cool in the mobile, digital world, you need to be texting, IMing and posting on social networking sites -- Email is for old people, according to today's FT (where do we go from here).

But, as we've seen with our FYI project, some people are concerned that all this online action will add up to serious privacy issues, especially if you connect our activities across applications. Imagine if google maps, your phone's presence technology, increased storage capacity, and all the data -- things we've been doing (searching), sharing (photos and videos) or saying about ourselves (blogging) -- were easily available online.

 We don't seem to know anymore when our private behaviour is public, and more importantly, when our private behaviour becomes a public issue.  This was the topic of a seminar on public behaviour Duncan O'Leary held yesterday at Demos. Tim Hartford, author of The Undercover Economist, spoke about why we would care about the social cost of private behaviour. He seems to think that the further the government can stay away from muddling in private behaviour, the better. Why? because even if we don't know what we're doing, the government knows even less. Therefore, smoking bans are no job of government. Neither are tradable carbon permits, for example. Government should instead experiment with taxes and see what public behaviour results. It might not be what we expect, however.

 What would Tim say about online privacy? I don't think government will be taxing our instant messaging habits anytime soon. But do we still worry about doing it because we might one day see our private conversation next to our medical records online?

I doubt people will be able to imagine in advance the ways that their privacy might be breached, as was noted in our ‘Search Me’ event on online privacy with Google last week. But that doesn't mean they won't care when it happens.

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