The Streisand Effect

barbara-streisand-without-makeup

I learned something new today. The Streisand Effect is what happens when you try and shut something down online and as a result everyone finds out about it and loads more people see it than would have if you’d kept your mouth shut. It’s origins come from Babs’ suing of a photographer over an aerial photo of her house.

The wikipedia page relates it to this quote which I also like:

The [Streisand] effect is related to John Gilmore‘s observation that “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”

I found the term at the bottom of this page – despotify.se – a project to create an open source Spotify client.