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Not bothered Do anything but don’t forget to tell the world about it

As the Internet Web-2.0 morphs from amorphous websites into a community that mirrors the society, it increasingly looks like an ancient Indian village where you have to sit under the banyan tree by the river bank to get all the dope on everyone in the village. Only, this is a global village, where your neighbour might turn out to be a Canadian with bad past or more likely the dork in your apartment block.

Does the information help? Does it hurt? Nobody seems to care.

It was a birthday party of a girl about town that went into the wee hours. By 2.30 a.m. one of them uploaded the party photographs on Facebook from all the hugging, smooching to the tripsy traipsing for the splattered cake. From there, it was a series of a few clicks, Ctrl+Xs and, Ctrl+Vs and the photographs were out in the public domain untramelled by the groups and societies that promise privacy.

One newspaper recently called it wilful suspension of privacy.

"We have to live with it. I am on Facebook and have discovered a number of my classmates from Class X in Vizag which wouldn’t have happened but for the networking group. Yes I do get jobless fellows intruding, writing on the wall, casting spells, but I have to live with it. My world is my own, and no interloper can scare me," says A. Deepa who now lives in Buffalo, U.S.

Malathy an MNC employee had a nerve-jangling experience when a colleague came to ask her email id. "One of my ex-colleagues wants to chat with you," said her colleague. The guy turned out to be the one she dated long ago and who tracked her from her Orkut profile, to her communities and using an ex-colleague he tried to get in touch with her. A rattled Malathy deleted scraps and finally exited the networking group. Now, she’s back on another site: "I have nothing to hide. What people think about me I cannot change. So, why should I bother about what they think even if they write it?" is her rhetorical question.

If one networking site has modified its advertising programme where it bunched together everyone watching a particular movie, or buying a particular gizmo, it is nothing compared to Twitter. If mobile twittering includes all the SMSes you exchange with your pals, then on eht web you can follow friends or strangers through the weirdest things they are doing. Just tap in the name at: Find folks to follow, and start discovering the death of privacy. Some of the bloggers have twitter updates. So, it is like word version of Truman Show with you as the willing participant.

The death of privacy is no accident. A recent Pew study on ‘Internet and American Life Project’ discovered that 60 per cent of Americans are not unduly worried about their personal information getting onto the net. Contrast this with a Pew study of 2000 where 84 per cent of Americans were worried about finding their personal information on the Internet.

Aw! Come on Indians are also following the same digital footprints. Don’t believe it? Just see the signboard of a website where a girl in a tank-top raises two fingers to say that she has 2 million friends and you get the picture.

The Pew study coined a term: ‘active digital footprint’ to mark out the information that people willingly put the information on the net as against passive ‘digital footprint’. This happens when people see the Internet as a networking opportunity to increase their net worth or feel confident that they have nothing to hide. One networking site asks you to share the information about books you are reading. Harmless, you might think, but add it to the fact that you might be sharing the information with millions of users and you can be sure of one thing: you will not feel lonely again.

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