Radical transparency is an open environment that fosters openness and sharing. Zuckerberg believes that privacy is passé and it is no longer the social norm. In some respects this is true as people are sharing personal aspects of their lives with a much wider audience than every before. Weber in James et al (2008 p. 22) notes that to many youth "public is the new private: young people often realise that their blogs and homepages are public and accessible, but they trust that only their peers are interested enough to view them", although Facebook in general has tighter security than most blogs this quote highlights the mind set of many young people and their approach to their digital footprint. The advent of Facebook opened up the chapters of people’s lives to a much wider community. What constitutes as a ‘friend’ in social networking seems to vary wildly from person to person. Livingston's (2008) report on teens and their social networking experiences and has documented that teens frequently are willing to have people that they didn’t like as one of the ‘friends’ purely so there would be no awkwardness in their off-line lives and can maintain their peer network. As a result many individuals are sharing intimate expressions of their selves with people they don’t necessarily have any interest in. This is only one of the ways that our private lives are being transformed by social networking.
Social networking is a marketers dream come true, there is a wealth of data that pinpoints exactly where you are when you make a purchase or create an experience. Lately I’ve noticed that some of my friends have been geotagging their location in Facebook, perhaps I’m old fashioned but I don’t necessarily want everyone and ‘anyone’ including my friends, knowing where I am at any given moment only to be able to predict where I may be. I find this decidedly creepy.
We are giving our social networking community and Facebook more than just a geotagged collation of our travels and experiences, we are telling them exactly what brands we align ourselves with by using the ‘like’ function. This allows marketers to get an exact snapshot of the demographic that we sit in so that our consumerist dreams can be created for us.
An important aspect of Hutcheon's article is where he comments that there is a wealth of data that is collected that we can’t even begin to imagine “we have no way of knowing what has been collected, recombined, shared and stashed in places we never knew existed”.
Cloud computing is fast becoming a wonderful way of collaborating and freeing up space on our work and home computers, Google search facility and Google Chrome amoungst others record all manner of searching and computer use. The future certainly does look like it is moving toward a way of using information that is radically different from the past.
As long as we as educators continue to give our students guided social networking experiences our classrooms will be filled with discussions about what this means in terms of privacy and on the flip-side, what it means for their voice, which now has so many opportunities to be heard.
Hutcheon, S (2010) Facebook's Scary Secret. http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/facebooks-scary-secret-20101007-169ni.html
James, C., & Davis, K, flores, A, Francis, J,Pettingill, L, Rundle, M, Gardner, H. (2009). Young people, ethics, and the new digital media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Livingstone, S. (2008). Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: Teenagers' use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression. New Media & Society, 10(3), 393. 
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