In the early ages of my life, I was always fighting with my brother over if stuff was his, or mine usually ending with the clever and effective rhetorics of "It's mine" and "No, it's mine". While we could never get along about whose it was, I believe the principle was right - it had to belong to one of us. Today some of that principle has been lost. Some social media owns my pictures, anybody can visit my profile and learn stuff about me, without knowing me. I am, given that you Google me, a public person, unfortunately that was never my choice to make.
The privacy issue on the Internet has become even more important during the last years. When everyone is on it posting, tweeting, blogging, about stuff you usually only tell your closes friends, everything has changed. People live separate lives online then they do off. Some love to share, to tell the world about every little detail about their life, to post a video that everyone can watch, and some don't. The problem lies in that offline, you have the possibility to choose who you want to share what with, online is another issue.
To choose online, you have to be very careful. You have to read the fine-print, study who owns the rights to a picture, a video, that you took or made. That is not the Internet dream that I grew up with. I love the idea of sharing, to some friends, perhaps share an article with likeminded, a video with friends and family. But I want to be able to choose who to share it with, and to loose ownership of that video in the process is not only strange but also wrong. Offline, when I share a video with someone, perhaps in school, it doesn't make the video school property, why are the rules online not the same?
The simple answer is because we accept them, for now. The Internet is young, and social network and sharing online is also a young phenomenon. It's in constant movement and there are up and coming alternatives, with better conditions and privacy terms than the giants today, like MyCube. I would like to be able to skip reading all of the fine print and still own the right of my online life, I want the same control over my online life as a have over my offline one.
There is a quick fix to the problem, I could go totally of the grid, go offline. But like I have said, I like to share pictures, updates with some of my friends, I like my online life, but I would like to do so on my own terms. My brother and me had it right, all those years ago, it belonged to either him or me, it never belong to the playground we were on.
