BusinessWeek Raises the Prospect of Government Intrusion into Social Networking

BW blogger Heather Green considers a Pew Project's findings on the internet and warns of some ominous fears coming true:

Here’s what’s rather ironic about privacy pre-Sept. 11. The thing that the privacy folks used to warn about but which I think most people didn’t take as seriously was the notion that the government could be one of the biggest abusers of your right to privacy.

Then of course, we had wiretapping and the involvement of the phone companies in providing access to their trunk lines for domestic calls. And we learned about the FBI infiltrating group meetings that didn’t seem to have much to do with Al Qaeda, such as PETA and Greenpeace.

So, at the most basic, it seems to me that one of the places that folks might be concerned when it comes to privacy is social networks and what the government might do with information like that.

Jump over to BusinessWeek to read the rest, especially regarding the generational differences in attitudes about privacy.