Facebook Acts Like Users No Longer Care About Privacy
For some reason, Facebook can’t seem to keep out of the news when it comes to privacy issues. Unlike recent issues, the latest event comes from a software glitch rather than a poor policy choice.
This month, capping a long string of recent security and privacy blunders, Facebook allowed users to see the private chats their friends were engaged in. Another glitch allowed users to view the pending requests of their friends. In their defense, Facebook staff immediately brought down the chat feature and fixed the bugs to prevent any additional information leakage, and things were back to normal within a few hours.
Noble as their efforts to fix this latest privacy breach, Facebook has earned quite a reputation as being completely carefree in regards to their users’ privacy. This is evident by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement in a January interview with Mashable where he stated that users no longer care about privacy.
“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’s evolved over time.”
There are two issues I find contradictory in this quote. As I see it, the first addresses the social norm. Yes, we are much freer with sharing information nowadays. We use tools like Facebook and Twitter to tell people what we are doing all day long and it’s quite normal to find out that an old friend from high school is on their third cup of coffee and ready to freak out with the guy in the next cubicle. People share information like that all day on social sites because it is harmless banter among people we generally know and trust. It is a norm because it represents normal conversation among friends.
What isn’t normal is allowing anyone with Google to find out who my friends are, where I went to school, my favorite sports teams, the names of my children, etc.
The second part of Zuckerberg’s statement that needs evaluated is his use of the word “people”. He claims that people have become more comfortable sharing information, and this much is true. But just because someone shares it with others online doesn’t make it okay for Facebook, or any other social networking service, to feel they have carte blanche to distribute that information publicly.
Just because I tell my friends online that my family is going on vacation next week doesn’t mean I want Facebook to tell everyone. If I make the decision to share it with a few people it does not give someone else the right to make it public information. Period. As far as I am concerned, end of argument.
Ultimately Zuckerberg’s statement is simply wrong. Watchdog groups and Congress are putting corporations like Facebook to task on how information their users share online is handled for a reason. If people truly do not care about privacy anymore there would have been no outcry when suddenly their private chats were shown publicly; instead users would have mistaken it as another anomaly in the constantly shifting bipolar landscape of Facebook’s UI.
