• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, October 14, 2011

Forget online behavioral advertising planting cookies on everyone’s browsers. Forget the prospect of some enterprising data geek knitting together all that non-PII (personally identifiable information) into PII. Forget the stalking of retargeters. Forget the fears of being prejudicially segmented by marketers into unfavorable audience buckets. Forget about National Security Agency snooping. I say, set aside all of those concerns over privacy violations by any third party. We may all have our hands full for a while just managing the trail of digital behaviors all of us leave exposed haphazardly in a world of cloud storage and computing.

“Dad why is a Playboy centerfold in your photo gallery?” my daughter asks, as some surgically enhanced boobs appear in 60-inch diagonal HD glory on the home TV set. Huh? What? Say, how did that get there, I wonder as I grab the Apple TV remote from her hand and quickly move on to the next image.

“Not better, Dad.” Oops, more Playboy images.

They were screen grabs I was making on my iPad to illustrate an article, I try to explain.

“Uh, huh,” she says,

She has been the daughter of a pop culture critic for a long time and has seen the parade of oddities that has strutted through our living room and come off of UPS trucks. So I can get away with this (honest, by the way) explanation for why naked women are in my photo gallery better than most. But the route these boobs took from my iPad to my TV screen is part of a personal breadcrumb trail charting our behaviors that each of us is leaving for others to follow. It all has to do with the “cloud” and the redefinition of “personal” computing into something much broader.

In my case, this all had to do with my testing the new Apple iOS 5 operating system for the past week across my devices. Cloud-based storage and backup of apps, data and photos is part of the new infrastructure running and now tying together my iPhone, iPad, Mac Air laptop and Apple TV.  Now when I download an app on one device or even take a picture, buy music, or make a bookmark, much of it is mirrored on the other devices. For images, it all takes place in what Apple calls the Photostream. New images I take on the iPhone or iPad are loaded into the new iCloud virtual storage space. All the devices can access this stream.

One day last week I was grabbing screens on the iPad of Playboy’s HTML5 archives for tablet owners. Yesterday, when I was able to download the latest OS for Apple TV to make it compatible with the iCloud functions, I could turn on the Photostream. When all things were set to their default open modes, there was a free flow of images taken or stored on any of my iCloud connected devices to one another.

In fact, if I am not careful, the Playmate breasts that got snapped on my iPad could end up being in the flow of images on the Apple TV screen-save. Explain that one to the neighbors or Mom and Dad when they are sitting in the living room and the dormant Apple TV goes into screensaver mode. Oops.

Of course all of these shared media cloud tricks can be adjusted on the device so all things are not shared. Still, it is harder to take one of these “clouded” images out of the Apple Photostream than you would think. The images just hang in the cloud even when you delete them from individual devices.

My anecdote exposes a real issue about how the emergence of the cloud as the next big thing in personal computing is going to extend a phenomenon that started with social networking. Are we always cognizant of who we are speaking with on these highly interconnected systems -- and what record of our actions we are exposing? Complain as we might about third parties tracking us, we leave incredibly dense trails of behavioral data about ourselves. But more than that, as our activities are streamed to the cloud and we live in a connected device world, the behaviors move fluidly from personal devices to shared and even public devices.

The problem is that context matters when it comes to how privately I regard my activities. And the cloud and a post-PC world makes that issue all the more apparent. The images I might make on a cell phone and regard as intimately as I do the phone itself now are streamed into other contexts. The other devices accessing this cloud are not nearly as personal anymore. In fact, in the case of the Apple TV, the devices are deliberately social. But so, too, is the iPad or some other access points that we will tend to share more than we will a phone. Now we all have to get in the habit of tweaking privacy settings even on our own “personal” cloud.

This is where the issue of data privacy takes an interesting new twist and forces everyone to think harder and longer about the ways in which the device we covet are blurring personal and social, private and public.