Over the past couple of weeks I have experienced one of those synchronicity moments that seem to come along every now and then.

Earlier this month I was in San Jose for the “State of the Valley” conference, the yearly event that attracts legions of high tech guru’s and wannabe’s to discuss the prospects for the freewheeling, entrepreneurial environment that has made Silicone Valley what it is.  (According to James Fallows, the keynote speaker, the Valley can rest easy about the threat from China – they don’t have what it takes to dethrone Silicone Valley as the most outside-the-box box in the world.)  After the keynote, Colin Rule and I stopped by the Google compound to talk to one of their newly hired R&D managers.  He’s working on natural language research that will lead to ever more refined notions of who you are (and by you I mean you as an individual who uses the Internet to buy, sell, and communicate).  I was interested to hear that, in his opinion, FaceBook is ahead of Google in this research area, but even so, it is pretty impressive (or frightening, depending on your point of view) to see what either can do with the words we use to communicate online.  Our short conversation highlighted again for me the fact that privacy is an illusion if you have any presence at all online.

Coincidentally, last week Alan Westin died.  Westin was the Columbia professor of public law who wrote the seminal text in privacy law (Privacy and Freedom), extending Brandeis and Warren’s argument that privacy is a right – the “right to be left alone.”  Westin’s original position was that individuals have a right to control what information about them is distributed, to whom, and in what circumstances.  That idea seems quaint now.   Westin’s position shifted dramatically as first we voluntarily put on sites like FaceBook details of our lives that probably should have been kept private, and then involuntarily surrendered information about ourselves through the kind of research that Google and FaceBook are racing to perfect.  In the end, Westin’s attitude seemed to be that we can no longer control the information about ourselves that is public, and that privacy law should shift focus to protect our right to make sure that the information circulating about us is at least accurate.

I’m not sure there is any deeper meaning in the juxtaposition of these two events than simply being another marker in the physical passing from the age of digital immigrants to the age of digital natives, but it does highlight that among all the other changes that the use of online communication tools has brought about, what we have now is ‘not your father’s privacy.’