A very long time ago (longer than I want to remember, frankly), I was studying for my certification in technical writing. One of our projects was a report on the future of technology, and one of my classmates gave his on the dangers technology posed to privacy. I remember feeling panic as he described how our data would someday be interconnected and available for various agencies, businesses, even random people who had access.
Fast forward more than two decades later. The recent uproar over Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg’s January 2010 statement about the changing attitudes toward privacy ― and how it’s playing out today on Facebook ― reminded me of this presentation.
Back in January, when Zuckerberg made the statement, blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web posted his remarks in a blog entry:
“…in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.
“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”
They just went for — what? A recent article on Wired, “Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative,” explains:
Facebook decided to turn “your” profile page into your identity online — figuring, rightly, that there’s money and power in being the place where people define themselves. But to do that, the folks at Facebook had to make sure that the information you give it was public.
So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.
This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.
That more than 20-year old fear came back. Is the privacy we’re giving up for convenience worth the price? We’d like to hear what you think.
And just to underline the fear, we’ll leave you with an instructional video from the ACLU that that first surfaced a few years back on YouTube. This reality isn’t that far away:
