I was sharing my coffee shops analogy for social media spaces, boundaries, power, and negotiating our personal digital networks recently and the person I was talking with asked me to write it down …

The Kim Darroch leaks highlight how hard it is to keep any communication confidential. How can we regain our privacy?

Compartmentalizing our distinct personal identities is increasingly difficult in big data reality. Pictures of the person we were on past vacations resurface in employers’ Google searches; LinkedIn which exhibits our income level is increasingly used as a dating web site. Whether on vacation, at work, or seeking romance, our digital selves stream together. One result is that a perennial ethical question about personal identity has spilled out of philosophy departments and into the real world. Ought we possess one, unified identity that coherently integrates the various aspects of our lives, or, incarnate deeply distinct selves suited to different occasions and contexts? At bottom, are we one, or many? The question is not only palpable today, but also urgent because if a decision is not made by us, the forces of big data and surveillance capitalism will make it for us by compelling unity. Speaking in favor of the big data tendency, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg promotes the ethics of an integrated identity, a single version of selfhood maintained across diverse contexts and human relationships. This essay goes in the other direction by sketching two ethical frameworks arranged to defend our compartmentalized identities, which amounts to promoting the dis-integration of our selves. One framework connects with natural law, the other with language, and both aim to create a sense of selfhood that breaks away from its own past, and from the unifying powers of big data technology.

re Documenting the Now

An online community at this scale has perverse and dangerous consequences.

Facebook suffers a privacy violation and questions moral compasses.

I saw the internet create and destroy a bizarro version of myself.

Open up a new tab, and do a quick Google Search for “The Internet is full of…”I’m guessing your autocomplete looks similar to mine: “The Internet is ...

‘Once posted, forever toasted’: as 10 would-be Harvard students learned, it pays to be careful about what you say online and where you say it

The company’s content moderation guide suggests it hasn’t come to grips with its unique role in the world.

Private Facebook groups are a new way for women to find sanctuary online, but the consequences of honesty can be dire. By Lyz Lenz  (Photo: Florent

Clever stuff about avoiding context collapse, and how Snapchat and Instagram have different tones.

Both Snapchat Stories and the newer Instagram Stories let users experience their friends’ most intimate and endearing moments in a news-free zone.

Its business model relies on users sharing personal data instead of cat videos, but that is happening less and less – and it’s a devil of Facebook’s own making

Is the world's biggest social network in trouble?

The importance of privacy for human dignity, autonomy, and relationships