I want my privacy...and to strip naked in public

Do we - do I - want privacy or not? One minute we're getting paranoid about criminals stealing information from our hard drives and MI5 treating us all as potential terrorists, the next we're posting intimate photos and details of our lives on Facebook and sending out a tweet about the state of our bowel movements.

First up today we have a report from Which magazine recommending that old hard drives be smashed with a hammer. They think nothing short of that will stop your personal information falling into the hands of criminals. The only problem is that Which's advice is utterly ludicrous.

Encrypt your data. Wipe the disk with a decent utility (or make sure someone else does) when you get rid of it. But, as the Register points out, there's a serious chance of injuring yourself when you take a hammer to your hard drive, quite apart from the waste of destroying something that works perfectly well and could be used by charities.

Second, we have a speech by Jonathan Evans, head of MI5, in which he said that the security services need access to all our emails and details of the websites we visit in the name of national security.

This is just silly. No problem at all with getting access to all that information and more on suspects, with judicial oversight. But MI5 are telling us now that they don't have the manpower to keep track of 2,000 terrorist suspects. Exactly how are they going to gain useful information from the emails and web browsing habits of fifty million? They won't. They'll get buried in false positives and it won't make us one bit safer.

But just as we worry about MI5 and Eastern European criminals getting their grubby hands on our private information, we eagerly hand it out to the world on social networking sites, blogs, and websites. At least it's our choice, but I'm not convinced it's a very informed choice.

Do we really understand what effect putting our often-dodgy opinions, drunken photographs and talent-free home videos online will have? An online photo is for life and, if it's on Facebook, you've given the company permission to use it for any purpose as long as you leave it on the site - as their Terms and Conditions say:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant... to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide licence (with the right to sublicence) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise,

Nursing mothers actively want to post photographs of their breasts for the world to see and are getting annoyed when they're not allowed to. We like exposing ourselves.

We choose to have our accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, and Myspace. We choose to have our blogs, to fire off the occasional ill-considered email, to upload rubbish video clips to YouTube. And we enjoy the voyeurism of seeing others caught with their pants down (sometimes literally).

So at some level we accept the risks and live with the consequences. Will I miss that job opportunity when the interviewer sees my party photos or reads my blog, or sees my personal ad on that swingers' site? What will my parents think if they see it? Will political opponents use a late-night drunken post against me? Or is my sober output quite incriminating enough?

Where does that get us to? We're rightly concerned about the risks ID cards, identity theft and over-zealous policing pose to our privacy and security; but we haven't given much thought to the privacy we're all choosing to give away.

Perhaps we should; but stripping naked in public is such good fun and it would be a shame to spoil the party.