Trade Offs

There is an interesting piece that argues that "Web users will trade off privacy for security and convenience." I've been thinking a lot about how privacy is imagined as a zero-sum with other values in computational culture for a while, and I'm not sure that security and convenience often come bundled together for consumers.

Privacy issues are also being raised by the ACLU, which has designed a Facebook privacy quiz that shows the site's users how third parties can easily get access to private information when Facebook friends take any of the site's proliferation of online quizzes. After the interactive experience of taking the quiz, Facebook users are encouraged to sign an online petition objecting to the way that Facebook acts can harvest information from users without their knowledge or consent.