No more private life

You may think you have a clue about the privacy issues of the information revolution, but what if the very concept of privacy gets transformed?

Our concept of privacy relies on the fact that it's hard to discover information about other people. Today, you've all got private lives that are not open to me. Even those of you with blogs, or even lifelogs. But we're already seeing some interesting tendencies in the area of attitudes to privacy on the internet among young people, under about 25; if they've grown up with the internet they have no expectation of being able to conceal information about themselves. They seem to work on the assumption that anything that is known about them will turn up on the net sooner or later, at which point it is trivially searchable.

That's an excerpt from the transcript of a speech by science fiction writer Charles Stross. It's a long read, but a fascinating look at the near future. Stross says we're all going to end up on Wikipedia -- and that means far, far more than you think it does.