Internet Privacy is Not a Social Norm

Recently, there has been an upsurge in articles about the decline of privacy, thanks to social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Last.FM, and the other variations. This is probably due to statements made by Mark Zuckerberg in a recent interview with TechCrunch, which were later denied by a spokeswoman from Facebook, saying that privacy was dead. Actually, it would be better to paraphrase it in a nicer manner: The age of internet privacy is over, and it is not a social norm.

However much a person wants to disagree, Mark is actually quite correct. People are willingly putting themselves out for public view on the internet through these multiple websites. Others before him have stated that we have no privacy, such as Scott McNealy. Understandably, some people are stuck in a quandary over the privacy they are allowed in the profiles they maintain. Remembering back to when I first started university in 2003, which also coincided with the first major growth of Facebook among college campuses, I can recall people who anticipated the day that they would be granted access so that they could keep up with their friends and those who had their reservations about the up-and-coming social networking website, which made it easier for others to essentially stalk them.

Today, it's hard to go to any website without seeing some form of integration with another social networking website. News articles have links to share with Digg, Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook among the many. Many celebrities and news sources have their own pages, making it easier for fans to follow them. Quite a few Indie bands have found more popularity through use of MySpace and Last.FM, while there have been recent discoveries of supposedly talented people on YouTube. Honestly, we can probably go back to Google and see their intuitive reporting of what we search for and what we get emails about to "accurately" provide advertisements. It wouldn't be far-fetched, considering Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told CNBC something we've all known for quite awhile: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

While there is a grain of truth in that sentiment, there are quite a few things that people do that they have no desire for the rest of the world to know about. It doesn't have to be a major moral or ethical travesty, such as cheating on your wife. According to Zuckerberg, "[p]eople have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. The social norm is just something that's evolved over time." However, for many people within my age range, it's actually coming back to bite them squarely in the rear end.

Those who were in college before Facebook even existed know of some of the stupid things they probably participated in. Growing up, I know I overheard stories from various adults about how they made mistakes, such as drunken stupidity, that they would never again want to repeat. Maybe they had pictorial evidence, but it's far easier to keep a photo album or package of photos hidden beneath your bed (though, you might want to think twice about who you screw over in case you decide to run for public office; anyone who retains or has access to these pictures just might want to harm you with them, and it's much easier to do now). Though a person can untag themselves in photographs on Facebook, they cannot really control what their friends upload and who has access to such uploaded material. As a result, a potential employer only has to go to Google, type in the applicant's name, and then find whatever lewd or crude photographs they have posted. I know a couple girls in Indiana have learned this the hard way after posting "sexy pictures" on their MySpace profiles, and it's only with an extracurricular sport instead of a paying job; this sort of news is probably going to harm them in the long run, especially since now their silly teenage escapades are going to be kept within a computer server that they cannot access.

But the question still remains: Should the silly things people do when they're 16 really have an affect on them later in life? Should a person's night out at a bar keep them from getting a teaching certificate? The fact of the matter is that it's happening, and it's going to continue happening whether we like it or not. People are going to have to become more creative to keep their information safe, or we're going to have to avoid these environments entirely; the latter isn't entirely applicable, because so many of these creations have become things we rely upon (Google's search, for instance). Children, teenagers, and young adults... No, actually, everyone is going to have to learn what they can and cannot put online; they're going to have to review the consequences of putting videos or pictures up for public view. While you may view something as "expression," a potential employer can view it as a fault.

An interesting side note that I must mention is just how incredibly crass the spokeswoman for Facebook is in making comparisons. When Mark Zuckerberg's pictures were made public due to the changes in Facebook's profile control, they later disappeared after the news of their existence spread. In response to public criticisms of this and the interview, she made the following statement:

"If the assertion is that anything Mark chooses make private is inconsistent with his remarks last week, here are a few other hypocritical elements of his life: he hides his credit card numbers in his wallet, he does not post the passwords to his online accounts, and he closes the door behind him when he goes to the toilet."

Perhaps she's forgotten, but his privacy settings on Facebook aren't going to give us access to any of those pieces of information (unless, of course, he makes posts including his credit card numbers or passwords or uploads pictures or video of him in the toilet - just to note, all of that would be horrendously stupid for anyone and quite disgusting). He reserves the right to make his pictures harder to access, yes; however, the public reserves the right to criticize him and his company for creating particularly terrible privacy settings that even Zuckerberg himself finds problematic for his own information. So are we asking him to be consistent to the extreme and provide us with information that even the laymen don't willingly provide others with? No, but we reserve the right to question his methods and the ethics of his company, just as we do for every other website we use (or should be doing). There's one big difference between Twitter and Facebook; people knew what they posted on Twitter could be found on search engines when they signed up, while Facebook's users weren't expecting it to follow suit in the unethical manner it has chosen.

That isn't to say I abhor social networking sites. I try to keep most of them as private as I possibly can, never really sharing data or posts I would be embarrassed about. I participate in Last.FM because I love music, and it provides me with similar artists I probably wouldn't have found on my own. I've used Facebook since I was first able to, keeping it as restricted as their "intuitive" privacy settings allow me. I toy around with Twitter, using it primarily to follow my favourite British comedians. I can see how some people see it as the "wave of the future," but I think it should be viewed with caution. We complain that our governments are becoming too Orwellian, but many have no problem willingly providing the same information to private companies; that has always struck me as odd.