Recently, the popular social media technology website Mashable joined forces with CNN.com to provide technology and social media news. As part of the arrangement, Mashable Founder Pete Cashmore will be writing a weekly column for CNN. This morning, Cashmore came out with a bang for his first column, making the bold proclamation that “Privacy is dead.” If you’re going to write a column for CNN, you might as well make it worth talking about, right?

From Cashmore’s article:

Privacy is dead, and social media hold the smoking gun.

Photo-sharing site Flickr made a brave decision in its early development: By default, photos would be public. Though ambitious at the time, the choice now seems obvious. What value do photos have when they’re not shared?

Twitter followed suit: Its private accounts are rare, meaning Twitter’s fire-hose of updates is becoming an invaluable stream of the world’s consciousness (incidentally, this month saw that stream licensed to both Microsoft and Google to bolster their search efforts).

Even Facebook, which once held fast to its model of private sharing among close friends, is pushing an “everyone” button that makes your updates public.

[...]

We’re living at a time when attention is the new currency: With hundreds of TV channels, billions of Web sites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, our attention is more fragmented than ever before.

Those who insert themselves into as many channels as possible look set to capture the most value. They’ll be the richest, the most successful, the most connected, capable and influential among us. We’re all publishers now, and the more we publish, the more valuable connections we’ll make.

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Fitbit and the SenseCam give us a simple choice: participate or fade into a lonely obscurity.

First off, congratulations to Pete for writing his first column for CNN. Mashable is the best place on the web for the most up-to-date information on social media technology. It’s great to see the site expanding and attaching itself to such a wellknown and respected name in news.

That being said, I think Pete misses the point somewhat in his column. For Pete and others like him, who live and breath social media, privacy is most certainly dead. That’s because they chose to kill it by signing up by sharing their lives online. I too fall into this group. In addition to writing here at the ReputationDefender Blog, I also have my own personal blog and am a contributor to numerous other websites. I chose to be proactive in how I appear online and (thus far) am happy with the results.

There are others, however, who don’t get to choose how their name appears online. Rather, they have that choice made for them. Sometimes, it is as simple as a people search database sharing their telephone or e-mail information online. Other times, a person may have their name slandered online by a malicious and, more importantly, anonymous attacker. To men and women who would prefer to live their lives offline, and “fade into a lonely obscurity” as Pete puts it, the reality that there are people out there using their good name against their will is a terrifying prospect.

To these men and women, who represent a sizable chunk of our population, the need for stricter privacy controls and more accountability for defamatory online speech is one of the most urgent issues they face today. We’ve already seen court rulings begin defining the limits of anonymous speech online, not to mention the world’s leading Internet organizations being grilled before Congress on behavioral marketing. In other words, while privacy may be dead, the debate over privacy is still very much alive.

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