Privacy, Frictionless Sharing, and Hasah Elahi

I originally wrote about Hasan Elahi four years ago following an article in Wired, which described how he was incorrectly questioned by the FBI, and the Tracking Transcience project he began as a result to share everything about his life – where he was, what he was eating, his purchases etc. (My original post is here). Way before frictionless sharing became available to us all!

I thought it was worth sharing his recent TED talk which was queued up in my always growing list of videos to watch;

It’s something which is going to be a growing issues for more of us as ‘frictionless sharing’ and online lives are the easiest for people to track and interact with. Rather than trying to hide everything, perhaps overwhelming the systems with information is the more effective route, particularly, as Elahi points out, the various Government agencies in every country whose stock and trade is information. After all, ‘Everyone’s a curator now‘

Frictionless sharing and frictionless ambivalence

I’ve been looking at the rise of ‘frictionless sharing’ – exemplified by Spotify autoposting every song you play on Facebook. The insightful Chris Thorpe summed it up well with his blog post comparing it with frictionfull sharing.

What I really want and act upon is that one personal recommendation from someone I trust/respect/like for the one thing that really matters – a new song, a book, an article. Something that someone saw and though they absolutely had to share with me.

After all, I thought at this time of year it’s meant to be ‘the thought that counts’, and ‘it’s better to give than receive’. No thought goes into autoposting, and you’re giving me nothing – except a bunch of unfiltered noise alongside everyone else doing the same thing in my friends list.

Unless you’re doing it to devalue government information agencies, in which case you’re far more interesting than your choice in mainstream pop suggests…