One of the blogs I tend to read is ReadWriteWeb ( RWW ). Yesterday they had an interesting article that got me to thinking a bit. According to RWW, Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over.I read the post and the comments and watched the video. I guess the whole thing for me is, is this an accurate representation of what is really going on with society. Do people really care less about privacy? Are we really tending towards "more open" than "more privacy?"
Personally, I tend to believe that people are leaning towards taking privacy less seriously. That isn't to suggest that people care less. They still want their privacy. And when their privacy is violated they tend to get all up in arms about it. Take for example the high school student who posts not-so-flattering-things about their principal on their Myspace page and ends up getting kicked off the cheerleading squad or other school activity. Perhaps they thought that information was private, but didn't select the right setting? Who knows. Better yet, consider the teacher who posts pictures of her drinking at a party and subsequently loses her job and ends up getting all upset about it. Let's face it, the best thing to do is NOT put that info out there if you don't want the whole world seeing it.
But seriously, where does this attitude come from? Being a guy in his forties ( I hate to admit it . . .but ) I can remember when I pretty much took it for granted that stuff about me was private. I think a fairly decent example of this was the fact I used to prank call Domino's Pizza quite a bit. I would order pizzas for my friend across the street. Domino's always fell for it and me and my friend would laugh about it the next day. I could safely do this because caller id was not available. Now I could never get away with it.
Better yet assume that my girlfriend and I wanted to take naked pictures of each other. Back then I could use a Polaroid and there would be a single picture that I could hide or burn and no one would ever be the wiser. Today it's digital and copies could spread like a bad rash.
In other words, I think there's the issue of expectations. I'm not sure that people really expect privacy that much any more. We all know that our email addresses and phone numbers and any other information like buying habits are harvested with every swipe of a credit card or service sign-up. Then that information is sold to someone and they sell it and so on and so on. Our credit card data is but one hack away from being sold by some Eastern European computer geek since retailers, banks and credit card processors take data security about as seriously as the Bush administration took hurricane warnings.
However, because some people have become complacent about privacy doesn't strike me as a reason to adjust your corporate policy. If anything I would think that becoming more of an advocate for privacy would be the right thing to do.
Personally, I'm not a big user of facebook. I don't have a picture of myself there and I don't update my status or anything like that. I just use it to keep an eye on my kids. So what facebook does with their privacy controls is only important to me to the point that I might need to remind my kids that they need to be vigilant.
Some of the people commenting at RWW think this is going to really hurt facebook and that it's a good time to be a competitor. I don't know? Does this really make you want to leave if you have a facebook account?
What would true competition for facebook look like? If greater privacy was provided would you be willing to pay for it?
