Did you know there’s a Gmail feature – Mail Goggles – that will prompt you to solve simple math problems before you hit send? This “soft paternalism” keeps you from doing something you’d regret later. By default, it’s only active late at night on weekends, “when you’re most likely to need it.” You can adjust the settings, though.
Here’s a long article (at NYT) — by a law professor — that discusses the dangers of oversharing and the “behavioral economics of privacy” — the trade-offs we make, consciously or unconsciously, when we decide to reveal or conceal information. (emphasis added)
[A] challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. …
[T]here was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from visiting the country — after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D. …
The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.
A collective identity crisis
People change. Not just from youthful indiscretion to mature adult, but – ideally – people continue to discover and pursue new interests throughout a lifetime. (emphasis added) Read more
