One of the great­est trends in tech­nol­ogy over the last decade seems to have been the ero­sion of pri­vacy, and I don’t see this chang­ing in the decade to come. Our greater depen­dence on the inter­net, social net­work­ing, blog­ging, shar­ing, sta­tus updates — they are all lead­ing us towards a world where noth­ing is pri­vate anymore.

And I think that’s great.

By and large it’s not some insid­i­ous cor­po­ra­tion or gov­ern­ment that’s doing it — the NSA may have their wire­taps and Google may dat­a­mine your search his­tory, but aside from tar­geted ads and some­what dubi­ous “pro­tec­tion from ter­ror­ism” nei­ther has had any real impact on our lives. There’s no scape­goat for most of our loss of pri­vacy, because we’re doing it to our­selves.

Every­thing inter­est­ing we do, we tweet. Every­thing we feel, we post a sta­tus update. Every­thing we think, we blog. Every­where we go, we check in. Every­thing we lis­ten to, we scrob­ble. Every minute of every day, half the world is shout­ing at the inter­net, “this is who I am, this is where I am, this is what I’m doing, this is what I think about it”.

Why do we do it? We don’t really achieve any­thing by it; there’s very lit­tle to gain for the amount of pri­vacy we lose.

We do it because it feels good and because pri­vacy isn’t worth any­thing.

We put our thoughts and our sta­tuses and our loca­tions out there because they’re essen­tially incon­se­quen­tial. It’s spo­ken about in some cir­cles as if it’s some great risk to your per­sonal pri­vacy if the inter­net knows that you’re in McDon­alds and you don’t think much of the fries today. But no-one’s going to exploit your Twit­tered fond­ness for Star­bucks or John Meyer. No-one’s going to wait until you check in on Foursquare before break­ing into your house. 99.99999% of the world isn’t lis­ten­ing and doesn’t give a damn.

But the tiny frac­tion that is lis­ten­ing, and the even smaller frac­tion that has some­thing to say on the sub­ject, gives us all the impe­tus we need to post. There’s that lit­tle endor­phin rush that comes with every com­ment on your blog, every retweet of your amus­ing sta­tus, that spurs us on. Even though it’s triv­ial inter­ac­tion, often with peo­ple we don’t know, it’s com­pelling enough.

And that’s why our loss of pri­vacy will con­tinue unabated — most peo­ple just don’t value it that highly com­pared to the increased level of human inter­ac­tion we gain by sac­ri­fic­ing it.

When it’s put like that, does it seem that bad? Human inter­ac­tion, knowl­edge of our exis­tence within soci­ety, makes us feel more ful­filled and ulti­mately hap­pier. If that’s the net result of this trend — if the constantly-connected, sharing-everything Pub­lic Human is a happy one, why fight it?

(At this point I should prob­a­bly apol­o­gise to the more privacy-conscious of my friends, to whom this post will seem awfully like I’m trolling. That’s cer­tainly not my inten­tion, though you are of course wel­come to reply and lay into it nonethe­less! Rest assured, I get my comment-buzz when I’m being dis­agreed with too. :P)