Privacy Virus

James Grimmelmann has a short but insightful post entitled: The Privacy Virus. Social networking services entice members to share private information, without any warning about the longer-term consequences.

" ... Facebook is a privacy virus: an organism that reproduces itself within a social network by convincing infected hosts to use their own replication mechanisms to spread it to others. And the way it gets past our privacy defense mechanisms is to turn them against us: social network service interactions have almost all the indicia we look for in reassuring ourselves that we’re in a private setting, rather than out in public ... "