Sometimes in history we look back and see some huge gaping holes in the logic of certain ideas that in retrospect seem obvious, but I’m sure looked like really good ideas at the time. Keeping bloodlines pure for the monarchies. Land wars in Asia. The launch of New Coke. Interest only mortgages.

So now, with everyone from my Grandfather to kinda Mark Zuckerberg to Katie Couric to the Senate and the Supreme Court weighing in on privacy in some way or another, I have to start wondering if we all haven’t made a critical logic flaw all the way back in the pre-millennial days. Maybe we as individuals made a mistake in expecting websites to hold our information and keep it private. More importantly, maybe we as publishers and marketers made a mistake in ever being willing to classify [most] of the information that we allow to flow through our systems as private.

Should we have attempted to provide some sort of anonymity of collectible data? Should we have pushed for a greater responsibility for information from individuals online?

Is the true, fearsome power of Twitter not in the 140 character get-anywhere messaging platform but in the “everything is public” concept that quite simply states:

Everything you put here is public. It is accessible for the world to follow. It is accessible for the world to forward. It will not go away. You are responsible for all that you say. You are in control: you create and consume as much or as little as you want. 

Is that the lightning that titans Facebook and Google are really chasing? And if so, is it too late for the rest of to learn from it and revise our models on what we really need to market?

I know… What about SPAM? Phishing? No privacy policy seems to have stopped it. Without them, wouldn’t the vendors that are less transparent and ethical fall away through scourge and disuse just like now?

This may be more questions than opinion, but I’d be very interested in hearing yours. Please email back, or leave comments.