"Human intuition about what is private is not especially good"

--- privacy researcher Frank McSherry, quoted in a Simons Foundation survey of differential privacy, Privacy by the Numbers: A New Approach to Safeguarding Data by Erica Klarreich, December 10, 2012

Quote in context:

“We’ve learned that human intuition about what is private is not especially good,” said Frank McSherry of Microsoft Research Silicon Valley in Mountain View, Calif. “Computers are getting more and more sophisticated at pulling individual data out of things that a naive person might think are harmless.”

The piece also discusses the exhaustible nature of privacy; a database can only support a finite number of queries before any pre-determined amount of privacy is lost. As McSherry put it, “Privacy is a nonrenewable resource. . . Once it gets consumed, it is gone.”

Whatever purpose a piece of information may have been created and shared for, it will eventually be used for something else

--- Steven Rambam, quoted in leader article on "The perils of sharing" by Andreas Kluth in The Economist's The World in 2008, p. 28

Kluth's conclusion:

"So there we are, a Google search away, for all to see in places and company we should not have been in, the unwitting backdrop of other people’s documentaries.

"The only remaining choice is whether or not to inject our own perspective, with our own media, into this never-ending stream of narratives, to preserve whatever control remains in presenting our own image. The wise will still share things about themselves in 2009. But they will become hyper-sensitive about sharing collateral information about others, in the hope that reciprocity and a new etiquette will eventually limit everybody's vulnerability, including their own. "