Vint Cerf: Media Tagging Can Be Disconcerting 96
coondoggie writes "Cerf says he profoundly feels the advent of cameras everywhere and the ability to post video and photos online can be hugely disconcerting. He recounts how he stepped once off a helicopter for a meeting in Brazil and minutes later was informed a video of himself doing that had been posted to YouTube, something he found to be a discomforting experience. He says getting constant notes about being 'tagged' in online photos from social networking sites such as Facebook still remains a bit of a jolt."
Re:Celebrities uncomfortable with their celebrity (Score:4, Interesting)
The trouble here is that the threshold for "celebrity" is becoming alarmingly low. The idea that you choose cede a certain amount of privacy when you choose to become highly visible -- and make no mistake, this is ALSO a very new notion in human history -- doesn't really make sense as cameras become omnipresent, and all media is instantly shared. Tagging is really just a mechanism for allowing that sharing, but the sharing plus the tidal wave of recordings is what marks a change.
You can use the "chosen celebrity" argument when you claim you have no sympathy for the privacy woes of, say, Demi Moore. But what about Rebecca Black? Jessi Slaughter? If a webcam and two minutes of 4chan's attention is all you need to become an internet celebrity or pariah, isn't that setting the bar pretty damn low?
In this case, Vint Cerf is a celebrity. To someone. Pretty much everyone can be called "a celebrity to someone" if you talk about a narrow enough circle of interests. Andy Warhol used to talk about everyone's 15 minutes. These days people like to talk about the 1000 True Fans that better networking allows. It all boils down to a lowered barrier between invisible private life and highly visible public life. Untagging yourself is never an option at this level. You're trying to do work to cancel the work of many more people (fans and friends), using many services, some of which you may not know about, all believing that they are the very least acting harmlessly. In this case, Cerf has basically just been good at his job, and outspoken in promoting History's Next Great Thing that he was lucky enough to be around for. Does that really justify publicizing every part of his public life? If so, what does that say for competent, ambitious workers of the future? Are the options really "get comfortable on camera or don't participate in society"?
Pretty much all privacy cases involving governments devolve into the arguments that to be able to spy is to spy (whether spying is actively being done right now or not). In civil cases, it comes down to whether the aggrieved had a reasonable expectation of privacy, "reasonable" being established by an average person from the greater community. In an existential way, it must be a bit terrifying to one of his generation that an entire younger generation has grown comfortable with, and actually embraces a level of self-surveillance the Stasi wouldn't even be able to dream of.