We're all celebrities in post-privacy age

By Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Move over, Paris Hilton. We all have celebrity issues in an age when anyone can create an online profile, post confessional videos on YouTube, or make snarky online comments about other people.

The latest generation of Web sites -- which attract tens of millions of users daily to share words, photos and videos about themselves and their friends -- make a virtue of openness at the expense of traditional notions of privacy.

"My grandparents would have had a different attitude about privacy," says Jeff Jarvis, a former critic for TV Guide turned top blogger and columnist for the Guardian in London.

"There is a different calculus now," he says.

Sites like Facebook, Photobucket and Flickr are enjoying surging popularity for allowing people to control their online identities in ways that make the danger of revealing too much information a constant worry -- and all part of the game.

"Within the Web realm there is no private self," argues David Weinberger, author of a newly published book, "Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder."

"The closest you can mean is that you are with a small group behind some password-protected mechanism," he says.

The danger of such exposure is that it could affect careers when students seek jobs in the real world or private citizens seek public office.