The “Transparent Citizen” in Web 2.0

Excerpt

The wave of indignation at the threat of a “security peepshow” was great when at the beginning of this year the discussion on upgrading airports with body scanners came up again. In many cases, such a commanded exposure was considered to be an unacceptable violation of human dignity. Drawing the attention away from the real to the virtual world, the U.S. market researcher Hitwise reported in March 2010, at the time when this editorial was written, that – in terms of the number of visits – the online social network Facebook had replaced the search engine giant Google as the most-visited U.S. website. Isn’t it remarkable that the majority of our society refuses body scanners, but cannot resist the daily temptation of the common “virtual striptease” in today’s “participatory Web”? Here, people (more or less) voluntarily provide more information about themselves than a body scanner could ever “expose”. A particular temptation (and risk) emerges from the simplicity and attractiveness of the business models used for current Web 2.0 applications, such as online social networks and weblogs: For the provision of personal data users “buy” the supposedly free access to attractive Internet services. The perfidy of this is that most users are not even aware of this “payment process” and the potential negative consequences. …