Privacy Concerns Overly Paranoid?

Microsoft Research member Alex Taylor is skeptical of the current wave of paranoia surrounding privacy issues in the digital age. While he readily admits that certain of our more pervasive fears may be founded in reality, the general discomfort around the widely proclaimed "Death of Privacy" seems in large part like a knee-jerk, and mostly ignorant, reaction to what is generally innovative and positive technology.

He sites the example of the Whereabouts Clock, which is currently being developed by Microsoft as a tool to help families keep tabs on one another so as to coordinate their days with the greatest possible effectiveness.

Taylor’s position, he makes altogether apparent, is not one of anti-privacy, but rather attempts to see the debate surrounding the issue as overly polarized and trapped in an untenable dichotomy that simply leaves out the facts in favor of vague and paranoid postulations of personal infringement. After having proved his point that the Whereabouts Clock was actually extremely popular with testers and was not in any way deemed intrusive, he concludes his piece with some lessons for the future.

Taylor writes:

The lesson in all of this is that we have the option to shift away from privacy and its supposed opposite, openness, as overriding concerns that drive so-called technological innovation. The real innovations, it seems to me, should be concerned with designing technologies that reveal enough of their workings to allow people to make intelligent choices about when they might want to share and when they might want to keep things to themselves.      

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