Ever since I started working on my presentation at HAR2009, I kept thinking about why people put (very) private things on the internet, visible for everybody. Because of my starting point in my presentation, privacy is a function of the identity creation process and that process is always bound to a relation, I came up with the answer that people put the information about themselves online with a relationship in mind. Their exhibitionistic behaviour is caused by not overseeing what other relations might be based on that information.
Recently I came across several other views on that. They all had in common that they stated that the modern youth has an attitude of sharing. You share everything and take action when you notice the information is misused. If you still keep running into problems because of the information you shared, then you couldn't oversee what could be done with the information about you.
Thinking it over, I think these two views really are the same: in both cases we can't oversee where the information about us is going and what will be done with it. The information about us, travels faster then our ability to comprehend what can and will be done with it. Still we want to share, because the benefits of it have been proven to be bigger than the damages we experience.
And indeed, we do live in a time where the "I have no secrets"-attitude has brought us big advantages. It is a new paradigm on the value of information. Was the old paradigm that information needed to be secret and protected to be valuable, the new paradigm says information becomes valuable when it is shared and increased. In the old paradigm the ethics were based on the ownership of information. In the new paradigm of sharing information, that kind of ethics are obsoleted: the information is out there and there is hardly any owner any more, even when it comes to information about persons. So where should we base our ethics of handling information in the new paradigm on? I believe it should be the responsible use of information: acknowledge the power that comes with the information and make sure that that power is balanced. Every unbalance of power is a potential abuse. And don't put yourself in a position where abuse is a far too tempting option.