People First Design

We are at a point in history where technology is forcing us to re-evaluate our understanding of privacy. However, too often the conversation looks like this, which was taken from the comments section of an article about Facebook:

“If you really don’t want to share….DONT PUT IT ON THE NET!”

I am not a technological determinist, but we are crazy if we don’t realize that there is a lot of pressure to put things on the Internet. And we can’t just blame people for being uninformed. People do it because they don’t feel like they have much of a choice due to the impending social pressures of being “on Facebook.” Of course they do have a choice, just like how we have a choice not to fill out every single field when we create one of our hundreds of profiles in the digital sphere. But there are a lot of people who happily fill out every single field, unknowingly giving away lots of information that they don’t have to, because that is what the interface is telling them that it wants. Of course we should try to inform ourselves about these things, but we can’t really expect every person to become “Facebook literate.” Continue reading »