Personally Embarrassing Information
PEI or Personally Embarrassing Information was a new acronym for me but one I instantly recognised and could differentiate from the more commonly known (at least in IT circles), PII or Personally Identifiable Information.
In her keynote talk at South by Southwest 2010, Danah Boyd, gave what I expect will become an oft quoted and seminal talk titled Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity. I find it amazing that SXSW doesn’t get recorded so the only way to find out what Danah said you’re gonna have to go read her crib sheet of the talk. It’s a pretty amazing crib sheet and an incredible keynote.
First up, it was a brave choice to give this as a keynote talk at a high profile event like SXSW. Why?
- Danah’s recent experience with the backchannel at Web 2.0 Expo.
- Danah is a Microsoft employee and choose Google and Facebook to make some of her key points during this talk.
- This is a very emotive topic and though I’ve never been to SXSW, I sense it’s a pretty emotive audience.
Given that, an average keynote would have been okay but this was no average keynote. It was thought provoking, creepy, funny and at times downright scary. Danah challenged the notion that is touted a lot these days that “Privacy is Dead”. Some may like to think that but clearly it’s not. I can vouch from experience as despite being pretty public on the web, I keep a lot of private stuff off the web – family and that kind of stuff. Not that I disagree with others who don’t take that path, it’s just the one I choose but as Danah points out, it’s becoming harder and harder to do so. You really have to work at it and I consider myself pretty technically savvy. For many of my friends and family, they’re broadcasting much more than I expect they know through Twitter, Facebook and other social media services. I wish I had time to help them all change their settings or at least show them how to.
There is some hard hitting advice in Danah’s talk for all of us but especially for the software industry and for parents. The web has become a beautifully engaging social medium but with it a public one almost by default. That’s a very different world from the one I and my peers grew up in but though as Danah notes:
youth focus on all that they have to gain when entering into public spaces while adults are thinking about all that they have to lose
In the era of social, celebrity and transparency we should not discard some social rituals like privacy that we too often take for granted.
I’d encourage you to go have a read of Danah’s talk "Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity"