I try, as much as I logically and realistically can, keep Facebook at arm’s length from my world. I realistically can’t delete my Facebook account nor can I just eschew using Facebook as a powerful promotional tool within social media. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Recently I commented on the nature of public and private and before that how employers perceive potential and current employees through their Facebook (and other social media) profiles, both posts raised some hard and difficult questions. Things that we haven’t really had to deal with before. Marshall Kirkpatrick commented last night (and I’m glad he retweeted it this morning) on Mark Zuckerberg’s comments on Facebook privacy from the Crunchies. Here is a particularly powerful part:
That’s Not a Believable Explanation
This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is “the vector around which Facebook operates.”
I don’t buy Zuckerberg’s argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.
Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient. Perhaps Facebook’s pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable, though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook.
This major reversal, backed-up by superficial explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook’s changing philosophies about privacy are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to exert control over the future of the web.
Beyond Zuckerberg’s youthful arrogance, he fails to acknowledge that many of the privacy changes he talks about weren’t driven by “changes in societal norms”, rather Facebook getting called to the carpet by the Canadian privacy commissioner and having to mend their ways, and fast.
I agree that a lot of what was once “private” is now public. In some ways this is good, in other ways I think it is hurting us all. Facebook is an agent of social change not just something carried in the tide of it. Many people have just gotten used to everything they do suddenly thrown into the public sphere. Personally, I still, haven’t completely gotten used to or am 100% comfortable with it (yes, this is hugely ironic, I know). I agree with Marshall that Zuckerberg’s stance is arrogant and dangerous, I prefer to keep Facebook locked down as much as I can. Eventually I’d like to create a nice, limited profile and (no offense) put most of my Facebook friends into that pool rather than how it is now.
If there was ever a time to seriously consider privacy it’s now. This isn’t even a conspiracy theory laden argument, it’s a simple fact that once something becomes public online, it’s there forever. You can’t get it back. You can’t, easily, become a private person after being public. The genie doesn’t go back into the bottle. Facebook sees dollar signs. Facebook knows, as we all do, that our information is a goldmine to advertisers. Facebook would like to have access to as much of our information as possible so it can be offered for sale. Yes, this is part of the deal when we sign up for the service. I get that, but to claim that society is changing is a logical fallacy.
I think that people haven’t changed as much as have become resigned to the fact that they have no control over their information. That isn’t change, that’s akin to being bullied. It’s akin to being told that for our own safety we have to give up a basic freedom like expression or assembly.
I know Facebook is a juggernaut. I know that for me to stand screaming into the wind calling for mass boycotts of Facebook is ludicrous and pointless, but what is neither ludicrous nor pointless is to encourage people to check their Facebook privacy settings and really think about what they are sharing with the world. Consider not what you’re sharing with friends, but your definition of “friend” of Facebook is.
That would be societal change.
