The NY Times Sunday Magazine has a thought provoking article by Jeffrey Rosen entitled “The Web Means The End Of Forgetting”. It’s filled with lots of good points quite relevant to the film biz in this time of audience aggregation and automized taste curation.
Rosen points out:
The truth is we can’t possibly control what others say or know or think about us in a world of Facebook and Google, nor can we realistically demand that others give us the deference and respect to which we think we’re entitled. On the Internet, it turns out, we’re not entitled to demand any particular respect at all, and if others don’t have the empathy necessary to forgive our missteps, or the attention spans necessary to judge us in context, there’s nothing we can do about it.
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As traditional media merges with new & social media, the issues we need to be concerned about also start to change. Filmmakers are only now starting to wake up to the fact that they should be the owners of the data that their work generates, particularly if they are being asked to license their work for such low fees as currently are in vogue.
Let’s say that you do gather 500,000 email addresses during the build and release of your movie. What are you going to do with those addresses? What moral and ethical issues are related to this?
Is it just my imagination or have I really not seen a privacy panel at a film convention? Who is going to take the lead on this?
And whom would you suggest be on this panel?
Have you checked out the Electronic Privacy Information Center?
The NYTimes reports on the latest glitch that allowed your “friends” to see your private conversations.
As The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported last week:
Facebook removed its users’ ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users’ profiles, “including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests” will now be transformed into “connections,” meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don’t want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them.
This site could not have been built without the help and insight of Michael Morgenstern. My thanks go out to him.
Help save indie film and give this guy a job in web design or film!
