Lifestreaming and Privacy- How soon will we reach a balance?

Josh Catone has a good post today on the 35 Ways to Stream Your Life. He identifies a lot of new services that I hadn’t seen before. As I looked through the various services, some of which I’ve used (I prefer FriendFeed right now) but most of which I haven’t, I thought about the privacy battles that Facebook has encountered. While I personally enjoy and use a number of these services, I continue to do so in spite of my best instincts. By using them, I am consciously compromising my privacy and putting personal information at risk.

Facebook represents the broadest set of “lifestreaming” features bundled into a single platform right now. As we use more of these applications that stream our every interest, thought, and purchase to our network of “friends” we continue to lower the “privacy” barriers and let people see more of our lives. We also assume some risk as inevitably mistakes will be made and even with good intentions our information will be misused in ways we haven’t thought of. The most recent example of Facebook’s Beacon comes to mind here- while many argued about the intent of Facebook and whether or not the feature was “evil”, nearly everyone agreed that it wasn’t implemented in a way that they were comfortable with.

So the question we face is this. We continue to see new lifestreaming services not only on the web but tied to our mobile devices, our cars, and our television sets and game consoles that offer our network more insight into our whereabouts and interest that ever before; how many “Beacons” will we have to encounter with these various services until we determine the right balance of sharing information with our co-workers, family and friends while preserving our privacy and protecting ourselves from those that will use our personal information against us? That is a question that will continue to plague us as we enter this era of an increasingly transparent existence.