Michelle Hofstrand/Flickr
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It was a compelling concept, if slightly frightening, even with safeguards like white lists and black lists. Browsing is a serendipitous activity that takes a lot of us to places we aren’t always proud of going—to do things that, as Schmidt might put it, we shouldn’t be doing. Still, tens of thousands of users were signing up in the early months, founders of these sites told me. Was this the end of private life online, however illusory? Would people be willing expose their behavior like that?I checked back on three companies I wrote about in 2011 that offered frictionless sharing. All three were kaput.
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A still from the 1936 film Things to Come, via MoMA's retrospective.
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It was a good thought, but turned out people didn’t care enough. Innovations like the Nike FuelBand and other “Quantified Self” tools that are health-related and keep our data out of the social sphere are exceptions, Leibsohn noted. Data for its own sake isn’t sexy. “We were probably being a little too hopeful… that the data itself would be compelling enough,” he said. “People don’t really think about privacy until it’s a problem… That activist standpoint wasn’t really resonating with that may people. It still doesn’t today.”Rousseau, too, believed that a society without privacy would be a society with no vice.
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