The discussion about on line privacy and data security has been so far restricted to the question of your personal data being hacked and someone stealing your identity. This can result in a host of problems which can be quite severe but can be potentially corrected. A whole bunch of things can be done to protect against this kind of problem. These include shopping on well known websites, watching your credit report, destroying credit offers, going through your credit card bills and so on.
At the other end of the spectrum is Michael Richards who immortalized Kramer in Seinfeld. I am a huge Seinfeld fan but quite frankly I did not get the same buzz I always got watching Kramer make the usual "Kramer" entry in a re-run last night. This has to do not so much with what Richards actually said in the comedy club but the fact that one could watch the real video on I think tmz.com. I will not link the video because I think the whole thing is just too painful. All this raises the question of privacy at the other extreme as Steven Levy writes in Newsweek. He mentions the Bank of America video that I had blogged about.
This whole "net star" kind of thing is indeed the new frontier of the whole privacy and Internet question. You can never assume that an audience you are speaking to is only listening or watching. The whole world might watch ! The PR,advertising and communication world has now an entirely new "public" to handle ! This is peer to peer , depends on buzz and is pretty largely volunteer driven. And it spreads like well -" wildfire" !