“You have zero privacy anyway, get over it!”

How long can the concept of privacy as we currently understand it last? The quote here, pulled from Duckham and Kulik’s 2006 paper, cuts strait to the point of the privacy debate in the modern era. Even a broad overview of the different conceptions of geoprivacy, as written in this paper, can never successfully address the cultural drive to change norms around privacy. This is best captured in this case by a footnote on page 3, which points towards historic examples of radically different conceptions of privacy. It’s clear that due to cloud computing, the internet, and globalized social media networks we are in the midst of a paradigm shift when it comes to how most people in the world conceive of the line between public and private. While it is clear there will be (and are) negative ramifications of this trend, as outlined in this paper, the steamroller of history is clearly trending towards a far less private world than has ever been seen before. This begs the especially interesting question of what will this change do to culture and society, particularly when geoinformation is considered. What does a country where everyone knows where everyone else is all the time look like? I don’t think it’s especially far off.

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