 Hi, this is Gerhard Leonhard, media futurist in Basel, Switzerland with another take on Gertube.com. Today I want to talk about a really hot topic that a lot of people have asked me about when I do my speaking gigs, which is privacy. The idea of being private with your data and with what your public profile says and so on. So privacy and publicity. Publicity is a term I think was brought up by Jeff Jarvis, who wrote a great book called What Would Google Do. And what we have on the internet now, we have this radical departure from this idea that we as individuals can be private if we go out now, we're sort of becoming by default public. I mean, if you're a musician, if you're a writer, if you're a businessman, if you're connected in some way to the sort of real world out there, if you're not just a student, but of course if you're a student that may also be true, but you're now connected to others, you're becoming public by default. So I can't tell you how many meetings I go to. And then before I get there, I Google the person in the meeting to see what kind of LinkedIn Facebook profile they have. I look at their profile. I go to Zing or LinkedIn or Facebook to see what that person looks like and what they're saying. And if I can't find their profile anywhere, then I'm suspicious if they're real. Maybe they're so famous, you know, I don't have to Google Richard Benson, I know what he does, but maybe what is the reason that we can't find them? So as this slide shows, there's a radical departure of this idea of saying, you know, we're private, but we want to do business and we're public, right? So all of a sudden we're switching and saying, okay, basically it's good to be public, but what about our privacy? I mean, it's sort of a chicken and the egg scenario. So we don't want our bosses to read our Facebook profile or our business partners to necessarily see where we spend the last vacation. So there's lots and lots of overlap there. But the bottom line is, as Jeff Jarvis says, we're going into publicity. If you're doing something that is public, you're becoming a public person on the web. And therefore it's really important to distinguish with what is private and what's not. I mean, what we're seeing now is radical transparency. If you go into my website and I don't have a website, if I didn't have a website, you'd be worried. What kind of business is this? They don't have a website. Then you go to a website, it's bad, that also makes you worried. But there's no Facebook profile, there's no LinkedIn, there's no QQ, there's no Mixi, there's no mobile site. And then you worry about if this is the right person, if you're in this kind of business. Of course, if you run a hamburger stand, maybe you don't need a website. But these days, people come to the hamburger stand and they give you a rating on TripAdvisor. So you still end up with the web. But as this slide shows, you know, radical transparency is here. In some cases, too much transparency also not good. You know, we're sort of playing with this mix of what a good idea is or not. But I would tend to say the more transparency, the better in general, not taking it all the way to WikiLeaks now. But if you look at the next page, this is sort of a joke on the internet a year or two ago, people were looking at Twitter and they were saying, okay, people are Twittering, they're leaving the house to go to this party and fixing their locations to the tweet. So now you have burglars watching tweets to see who's leaving the house so you can go to the house and break in while they're off because they're Twittered about being gone, right? So this is not the kind of publicity you want. And this is clearly one of the things that we need to figure out what are the borders of this and who's supposed to see what and how. The next slide has a bit of a cartoon, which sort of reflects how people are worried about becoming transparent. You know, this cartoon shows how you go to a date and you hold up the phone and you scan the person's face and you find their profile and you're looking at their profile says likes dogs or whatever. And then you're not going to continue with the date because you don't like the profile. This is already standard practice in Japan. Well, that's a good sort of societal thing to do is to look up my profile while we're having a drink, you know, but if you go to New York to some some bars that are known for meeting people, you can already observe this while some person goes to the bathroom, the person that you've just met Googles your name on LinkedIn to find out what you really do. And what they should continue the conversation. I'm not sure that's all a good thing. These are just probably playful things or a gaming part as I was saying my other video sort of a gamification of this process. But basically what the world will look like in the future is quite clear that if we want to do be out there and do stuff, we're very likely going to be public or sort of micro public in some ways. And that is the way forward because we are going to need this kind of connectivity. We have to guard what's private by not putting it there. Which is another thing. Now, if you're looking at this old shot from the Comcast technician that fell asleep on the couch. I mean, if you're a company creating something that doesn't work, or you're doing something that's not right, or your technician is falling asleep on the couch and trying to fix something, you will be found out. So now we're becoming sort of a real transparent society that has its pros and cons. But as a final slide, I think what's really important is that yes, it's about privacy, but it's also, you know, really important to understand why we want to be public for the benefit of being public. But we have to do it mindfully. We have to not do it sheepishly, especially not by publishing things that are better not published. But this is really up to us. I mean, we have a lot of power right now on social networks, and we need to use it. I think if we take this sort of wrap up and saying, okay, it's about publicity now, it's about creating another sign kind of privacy somewhere else, you know, that would probably be the right direction. I think this is very much a cultural thing as well. And of course, a question of age also. So if you're more interested in this topic, check out my website at mediafuturist.com and on Facebook G Leonhardt and the Futures Agency. Thanks very much for watching. I'll see you down the road.