It’s not easy to write about such topics, but it’s necessary. Not just because Facebook, Google, Amazon, WikiLeaks or different governments around the world, but because of the times we live.

Privacy, for example, might have never been such a huge topic if it would have been just about Facebook or Google. Without the Internet maybe we would have never had any clue about what happens in the military, secret services or corporations around the world when it comes to our personal data. Even tough signs of the coming Privacy Wars were easy to spot even in the early ’90s or as far back as the first computer viruses in the early ’70s, the scandals really took of in the 9/11 aftermath when people realized that The War Against Terror involves everybody. This meant data about one person could be used to draw good or bad conclusions regarding his involvement in terrorist attacks or who knows what other ugly stuff. Even a party in Vegas could get you into trouble, so it’s no surprise that The Hangover’s headline was “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”. Even a simple list of books you ordered from an online shop could get you into trouble, especially if they are about forbidden subjects. It doesn’t matter that this information was retrieved by a secret service or by a hacker who just got into the local bookshop’s website, that information might be dangerous for your profile. Profile, you say? Yep. Another sensitive data. Take care how you edit this, not because your future employer might check your Facebook profile, but also because anybody else can (from your girlfriend to the secret agents). You can read lots of pages about privacy when you sign up to any of the sites that now represent the backbone of the global commerce, but you will still have only scratched the surface of this problem. Facebook or Google, for example, are now facing the same issues other companies like Orkut had in the past (Google should know this quite well, since they bought this social network that was popular in Brazil years ago).

We didn’t mentioned the 9/11 aftermath just because this week we celebrate 10 years since the attacks, but because it was really an important date. Without the wars from Afghanistan and Iraq, a man known as Julian Assange would have never been so famous. Remember the documents he leaked online? Why WikiLeaks is so dangerours has some things to do with privacy and with the eternal question: “Where to draw the line between public and private life?” (and also with the equally important: “How can you establish which data must be known by everybody and which data must be kept secret?”), but also with a huge topic on its own: transparency. Fear of transparency is the main reason for the WikiLeaks scandal, but most of the governments around the world will not admit it. This is rather absurd since many of them are publishing tons of data online, including the governments from the US and from the UK. Basically transparency should have always been an integral part of public life. By saying this and watching the reaction of various parties to the release of the WikiLeaks documents one can easily draw dangerous conclusions like: True democracy can exist only if public data is available to anyone anywhere and transparency is an integral part of this process. The Internet together with the mobile devices is the only medium that can provide all citizens with access to information anywhere (you already know this if you read some other articles from our blog). Governments need only to apply this simple (but hard) concept.
So the question is how do we draw the line between public and private life? Between public and private spending when it comes to governments and corporations? Should we consider that from now on everything that’s private should also be secret, and everything that’s public should also be transparent? What’s important now is to understand them. In one day maybe we will also find solutions. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg was named CEO of The Year for 2 years in a row (several weeks ago), and that he and Assange were on countless lists with Persons of The Year (including last year’s Time Magazine list) only proves that these problems are far from being solved.