In Van Elsas’ excellent blog post about privacy he describes, referring to  Scott McNealy’s 2001 article “Privacy is dead, get over it”, the dangers of ‘publishing or sharing personal data on the web’.

I would like to comment to two of the issues he raises, since I am convinced that, ‘au fond’, life has not changed that much.

ON ‘reputation‘, for exemple, he writes…

Our reputation in the old days was contained within the social relationships we were involved with. These relationships were naturally confined to locations, time and people we knew. On the web this has changed dramatically. Now everybody has access to personal information of anyone online.

Now, in the country I live in, France, this is perhaps less true than in the relative transparent and vertically organized countries like The Netherlands, but I happen to believe that it is true wherever you live.
When I first arrived in the remote village of Sepvret, in the Poitou-Charentes area (SW France), I was impressed by the negative reputations people had built over the years, reputations that they were absolute incapable to modify, to turn into positive appreciations. Whether this was not their intention, or incapacity… probably it was a combination of the two, but fact is that they were confined to the images, most often created over decades ago, and had nowhere else to go or to turn to.

You do not have to meet someone to find out about him.

Quite often, I hadn’t even met my new neighbors, before being introduced to their reputations…

Each of the pieces of information are totally harmless when places in one context, but are quite damaging to your reputation in another. Your reputation is now publicly searchable and without the context of a social environment you are acting in, this can lead to harmful situations.

For me, these ‘pieces of information’ were not harmless at all, I have seen quite a few people suffer a great lot of their reputations, within the context of their social environment, and as said: with no escape like today’s Internet, I am convinced that life in remote areas of the world, just as in urban areas, must have been a burden quite often.

Van Elsas writes about ‘gossip‘:

This is probably an unexpected danger when we build up an online profile. We are much more vulnerable to rumors and gossip. Where this used to remain within the social borders you moved in, they can now reach the entire online world. Anyone that wants to do you harm has a platform to (anonymously) start gossip and rumors about you. As your online reputation gets harmed you will find that it is extremely difficult to protect yourself from this.

May I say that nothing has changed much, again, when comparing with “pre Web 2.0” world? We were equally, if not more, vulnerable to rumors and gossip, and I have more than once witnessed or experienced its devastating personal impact, in different social settings (big village/city – Amsterdam – rural France). The ‘social borders ‘ Van Elsas is talking about, were your entire (Real life) world. And whereas you can work on crisis communication in the online world, this seems to be more complicated In Real Life (IRL), where most of the time gossip is not a written issue, and thus more difficult to track back, let alone to react to!

Let’s face it: we all want our parts of celebrity, once we are active members of any online community. We may as well learn then, from the same celebrities: when reading Bernstein’s excellent book about Hillary Rodham Clinton, one is impressed by the stress caused by gossip and (negative) reputation – as well as by the personal strength a person like Hillary Cinton, like other celebrities, has to develop and maintain to stay herself: positive, active and… alive.

Where on the whole, I do agree to Van Elsas’ statement that online personal security and proper handling of personal data is an important issue, I do also believe that Web 2.0 usages are more and more IRL alike, though the scale may be different. In Real Life, we might expect that you give people a second chance, depending on the opportunity – you may do the same online and expect that human attitude in return.

So perhaps the main issue should be: as the web becomes more human, how do we handle other people’s information and are we intelligent enough to look beyond the first impressions, just like we are supposed to do IRL? And how many people are capable of behaving that way, IRL, anyway?