OpenSourcing Yourself, Are You Ready?

An anonymous reader writes "Many people love and use open source software. Open source has made an impact in just about every place imaginable; education, hardware, coke, beer, cell phones, pharmaceuticals, search engines and encyclopedias. However, OpenHuman takes it one step further and invites you to open source yourself to experiment with the open human idea. This may sound crazy and rife with privacy concerns but as the author asks, do you still believe in Internet privacy in the age of blogs, MySpace, LinkedIn, Meetup, and Flickr?"

Well

[imsabbel]

"do you still believe in Internet privacy in the age of blogs, MySpace, LinkedIn, Meetup, and Flickr?"

Yes, i do.
Thats the reason i dont have a blog, dont whore my photographs out to flicker, think myspace it a breeding experiment for retards and never heard of something called "meetup" before.

So i guess i dont really belong to the target demographics...

Unified data

[Foofoobar]

Having my data in several different databases that don't work together or coordinate their data in any way makes me feel safer than having all my data in one database for everyone to easily access. Reminds me of MS Passport.

Reality check

[mattpointblank]

"This may sound crazy and rife with privacy concerns but as the author asks, do you still believe in Internet privacy in the age
of blogs, MySpace, LinkedIn, Meetup, and Flickr?""

Uhhh, what? This is like saying "Why not just start murdering people? Come on, look at how full our jails are with murderers!". Granted that's a little extreme, but the justification for uploading a naked photo of myself is basically "everyone else is doing it!". No thanks.

Also, the site looks damn awful. Can anyone say "two-bit idea with even less design time"?

Re:uh wtf

[bladesjester]

Well, he does say that he hasn't had a girlfriend in about two years. That could explain quite a lot of this...

There's no such thing as privacy really...

[BalkanBoy]

there is only what makes you look good and what helps you avoid looking bad (think of this in a wide context - unless you are living isolated from humans, it applies anywhere - personal life, professionally, socially, everywhere). If everything you ever did only resulted in you looking good for everyone else around you, would really need privacy? Conversely, if you could avoid looking bad in everything you do, would you still need privacy?

So if you have something you like to keep private - 99.999% of the time, it has to do with looking good or avoiding looking bad.

Sad but true.

Re:There's no such thing as privacy really...

[TranscendentalAnarch]

Privacy is the restriction of information for your personal benefit.  A necessity in any healthy, non-utopian government.

This is "more open" how?

[mincognito]

Um, could someone explain how the OpenHuman concept "takes it one step further"? The founder's own page [openhuman.org] seems less open than most myspace pages.

It seems fairly obvious that being "entirely open" is a really, really stupid idea. It has been known at least since the 6th Century BCE [librivox.org] that your personal information (history, status, intentions, beliefs, etc.) can and will be used against you by others seeking power and your subjugation. To suceed in a world of conflict and competition at times requires deception: insuring that others cannot pin you down, that if they seek to manipulate you their efforts are based on misinformation. Are you going to include on your resume a link to a page that contains naked pictures of yourself, that cataglogs your personal problems and issues, and that details your secret fantasies? Sometimes it's best to just shut the hell up. If you really need to divulge everything about yourself, for therapeutic reasons or whatever, why not do it anonymously? Unless, of course, attaching this information to your real name is to your advantage somehow.

Clearly the "open" information provided by the site's founder has been prudently selected. To frame its presentation by saying "oh, i'm being 100% open -- this is the real me" is actually quite clever. A page like his might help him make contacts, show off his computer skills, get girls, etc. But it would be of no use to him if he included information about his sexual dysfunction, his absolute hatred for his family and pictures of his hairy ass.