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From the September 2008 Scientific American Magazine | 10 comments

Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy? ( Preview )

Young people share the most intimate details of personal life on social-networking Web sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, portending a realignment of the public and the private

By Daniel J. Solove   

 
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Key Concepts

  • Social-networking sites allow seemingly trivial gossip to be distributed to a worldwide audience, sometimes making people the butt of rumors shared by millions of users across the Internet.
  • Public sharing of private lives has led to a rethinking of our current conceptions of privacy.
  • Existing law should be extended to allow some privacy protection for things that people say and do in what would have previously been considered the public domain.

He has a name, but most people just know him as “the Star Wars Kid.” In fact, he is known around the world by tens of millions of people. Unfortunately, his notoriety is for one of the most embarrassing moments in his life.

In 2002, as a 15-year-old, the Star Wars Kid videotaped himself waving around a golf-ball retriever while pretending it was a lightsaber. Without the help of the expert choreographers working on the Star Wars movies, he stumbled around awkwardly in the video.

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