I recently got myself appointed (ie:volunteered) to a town committee. I mentioned this on FaceBook, a friend of mine followed the link to the town web page and commented that they published a lot about me. My reaction (aside from that I publish all that info myself) was that in the pre-Internet world we’d just look it up in the white pages.

I think there’s a lot of stuff that the privacy theorists scream and wail about that is exactly what helps bring humans together. We used to be aware of what happened to those who made our neighborhoods special. The ‘net has just made that neighborhood bigger.

I think people worry way too much about privacy in relatively trivial data and radically underestimate the value of long-lived archived public data. To me a missed connection or a lost memory is a much more pressing problem than having a stranger read something about me.