The person with the strongest expectation of privacy I know would plausibly be unhappy with me writing this sentence. Because this is a personal piece of information about him that I’m sharing without his consent—you might be able to find out who he might be and then know that he has this expectation.
I’m not sure what the person with the most public setting is but I know at least one person who has no problems talking with total strangers about her most private details. She does keep other people’s info confidential to a typical level. So it is not an extreme case like the marytavy mentioned elsewhere.
And I know many other people in-between.
When I figured this out my lesson was to ask people about their privacy settings. It’s a nice analogy with many people knowing these settings from FB. And if not that is also a nice nerd conversation starter.
What kind of settings do you ask about? Is it just sort of a sliding scale with your first example at one end and your second example at the other, or are there dimensions to it?
I will not bring up the topic until personal details are mentioned. Things that are likely not already known to a number of people. I may bring it up anyway if the conversation is longer and thus constitutes something of private detail itself. I will refer to the detail and ask for example:
“Do you want me to keep this details private? You didn’t say so and I have noticed that people have widely different expectations about that.”
“Normally, I would not share personal details but I would like to able to pass on things I learned from it. So may I share anonymized information from this conversion? For example: ‘A person I once talked to recommended to do X.’”
“Please also note that I would share anything you tell me with a significant other (of which I currently do not have any). If you don’t want me to share something with them we would have to discuss this in more detail.”
I will make an extra effort on topics that are typically seen as confidential for example about relationships, conflicts, or other details you’d share with a professional advisor. In such a case I might say:
“I will treat all we say from now on as confidential. No private details leave this room without talking to you beforehand.”
Another type of question might be:
“Are you public by default or private by default?”
People have different “privacy settings”.
The person with the strongest expectation of privacy I know would plausibly be unhappy with me writing this sentence. Because this is a personal piece of information about him that I’m sharing without his consent—you might be able to find out who he might be and then know that he has this expectation.
I’m not sure what the person with the most public setting is but I know at least one person who has no problems talking with total strangers about her most private details. She does keep other people’s info confidential to a typical level. So it is not an extreme case like the marytavy mentioned elsewhere.
And I know many other people in-between.
When I figured this out my lesson was to ask people about their privacy settings. It’s a nice analogy with many people knowing these settings from FB. And if not that is also a nice nerd conversation starter.
What kind of settings do you ask about? Is it just sort of a sliding scale with your first example at one end and your second example at the other, or are there dimensions to it?
I will not bring up the topic until personal details are mentioned. Things that are likely not already known to a number of people. I may bring it up anyway if the conversation is longer and thus constitutes something of private detail itself. I will refer to the detail and ask for example:
“Do you want me to keep this details private? You didn’t say so and I have noticed that people have widely different expectations about that.”
“Normally, I would not share personal details but I would like to able to pass on things I learned from it. So may I share anonymized information from this conversion? For example: ‘A person I once talked to recommended to do X.’”
“Please also note that I would share anything you tell me with a significant other (of which I currently do not have any). If you don’t want me to share something with them we would have to discuss this in more detail.”
I will make an extra effort on topics that are typically seen as confidential for example about relationships, conflicts, or other details you’d share with a professional advisor. In such a case I might say:
“I will treat all we say from now on as confidential. No private details leave this room without talking to you beforehand.”
Another type of question might be:
“Are you public by default or private by default?”
Someone pointed out to me that according to Danah Boyd the younger generation seems to run on “Public by Default, Private through Effort”.