Is Big Brother watching you or are you watching Big Brother?

A funny parody about Google's increasing invasion in our privacy got me thinking long enough to get me to write this post.



I guess it's no longer a mistery to anyone that we are living in times in which our privacy is being invaded from all fronts. Long live the social networks, the search engines, the personal videos, the tagged photos from some party where we overdid it with the booze. We are all 'up, close and personal', exposed more than ever before to our friends, but also to strangers.

It would probably be even scarier to see how all the data we are more or less willingly posting online are being used by marketers. We are surely turning into a pile of data, accumulated in time and that is being used in our disadvantage to make our every commercial behavior a certainty for the world's marketeers.

In the Orwellian tone of this blog, it would be worth mentioning Google Latitude or Loopt, the so called geo-social networks that allow users to track their friends at all times. Such services are particularly relevant for the mobile phones and it's no wonder that they are among the most popular social network applications on the App Store. Being betrayed by your own phone's GPS and being exposed 24/7 to your friends might not always be a blessing.

Our personal life is not the only one being exposed. Reuters recommends LinkedIn and Twitter for finding a job in these though times. Our professional life is now also out in the open, and let's face it, aren't we proud to share our achievements with everybody?

There is a point to this post and I am getting there. I have to be honest about one thing. The purpose of this blog is to get me out there, to get me noticed in this cluttered blogosphere. There's no doubt about this. And I am taking my chances, because I know this is just one more step to exposing myself to the world. And I chose to take it. Which gets me to the question: how much of this lost privacy is given up willingly? Is it not us who keep blogs, who upload party photos and update our statuses?

This is not to suddenly take the blame away from the big online players juggling with our personal life. What I am trying to say is that we are partially responsable too. In most cases, we are given the possibility to filter down and limit other people's access to our personal life. But when we start opening it up willingly, let's think twice before starting to show fingers at others.