Tim O’Reilly argues that the nature of privacy is changing, and that it would be worse for companies not to experiment in that realm than it is for companies like Facebook to push those boundaries and occasionally run into trouble:
The world is changing. We give up more and more of our privacy online in exchange for undoubted benefits. We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone; we give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points; we give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. As medical records go online, we’ll increase both the potential and the risks of having private information used and misused.
We need to engage deeply with these changes, and we best do that in the open, with some high profile mis-steps to guide us. In an odd way, Facebook is doing us a favor by bringing these issues to the fore, especially if (as they have done in the past), they react by learning from their mistakes. It’s important to remember that there was a privacy brouhaha when Facebook first introduced the Newsfeed back in 2006!
It’s a well-considered post, but I think he lets Facebook off a little too easily. To me, Facebook has committed one cardinal sin: expanding access to information that has already been posted without getting permission from users. If I post a photo to Facebook and only my friends can see it, those are the only people who should ever be able to see it, unless I give Facebook permission to show it to more people. Any other course of action is hostile to users, and Facebook and other sites deserve to be pilloried for making those kinds of mistakes.
Matt McKeon has created an amazing infographic showing exactly how Facebook has come to open up information people post to a wider and wider audience over time. This is the reason why so many people are linking to Dan Yoder’s 10 Reasons to Delete Your Facebook Account. The problems with Facebook have been exacerbated by the fact that for many people, it’s their first read/write experience online.
I’ve been deciding what I do and don’t want to share with other people online for 25 years, since I started dialing up BBSes on a 300 baud modem. It shouldn’t be any surprise that I don’t post anything on Facebook, really. I do keep my account though, and I’ll explain why. A few months ago I got a message on Facebook from a guy who went to college with a high school friend of mine. He was trying to get in touch with my friend, and I guess had remembered my name, or came across my profile on Facebook, or something. I really don’t know. But if Facebook didn’t exist, or had I not been on it, maybe “Farmer Ted” and “Beaker” wouldn’t have gotten back in touch, and that would be sad. So I stick with my minimal Facebook presence, even though I don’t really care for the site.
Bruce Schneier’s latest essay is about privacy:
To the older generation, privacy is about secrecy. And, as the Supreme Court said, once something is no longer secret, it’s no longer private. But that’s not how privacy works, and it’s not how the younger generation thinks about it. Privacy is about control. When your health records are sold to a pharmaceutical company without your permission; when a social networking site changes your privacy settings to make what used to be visible only to your friends visible to everyone; when the NSA eavesdrops on everyone’s e-mail conversations–your loss of control over that information is the issue. We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure.
He calls out the social networking sites for declaring privacy to be dead when, in fact, they are the ones who are continually working to kill it in order to make more money.
Today’s batch of links:
Nelson Minar has a short post explaining Google’s new interest-based ads and the privacy controls available to users associated with them.
Here’s the crux:
I’m usually quick to criticize Google on privacy issues. But not this time. Because along with this juicy new ad product, they’re giving users unprecedented control and visibility into the ads they are shown. We can opt out of tracking entirely. Or we can set our ad preferences, viewing and altering Google’s profile of ourselves. And Google has a detailed and readable page describing how their ad products works with personal user data. All of this privacy protection looks real, a user-focussed product, not just some sham to satisify lawyers.
Bruce Schneier’s essay on the fading future of ephemeral conversation is thought-provoking:
This has changed. We chat in e-mail, over SMS and IM, and on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. We blog and we Twitter. These conversations — with friends, lovers, colleagues, members of our cabinet — are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails.
We know this intellectually, but we haven’t truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we’re being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later.
I don’t think this is right. Some people haven’t internalized it, but many have. This is, in part, what I was getting at in my levels of candor post.
There are a huge number of things I would never say about a coworker in email. There’s a large number I wouldn’t say over instant messenger. The same goes for texting and voice mail. Some things are only worth saying on the phone or even face to face. I’ve been online in some fashion for over two decades, and I’m a fairly private person to start with, so I am very careful about not saying things that are going to turn up later.
Indeed, these days posting words, photos, and videos online is sort of like getting tattoos. Think ahead, because they’re going to be around forever whether you want them or not.
What I wonder, though, is whether we’re going to see some kind of crest in terms of how harshly people are punished for their previous online behavior. When there are embarrassing photos of everyone online, then by definition their existence will no longer be sensational.
Stephen O’Grady talks about the risks of using Twitter to publish personal information:
But for the majority of us, I always thought the costs of keeping everything under lock and key far outweighed the benefits. Now, however, I am being forced to reconsider that view. Because, as John Simonds reports (not to rag on John here, he’s just the messenger), one or more of the professional communities I interact and work with may use the tool to form an impression of me.
It’s not obvious to me that this impression would be anything less than professional. I’m generally not Twittering after a night on the town, every other word is not something that would be considered unprintable, and I’m not posting the intimate details of my day to day existence. But I need to consider it, still, because as I’ve discussed in the past, Twitter is a personal tool for me first, professional tool second. A distant second.
I think this is why we’re seeing more people with two Twitter accounts, a public persona and a private one that they share with friends. I haven’t gone that route, however, I will say that my Twitter feed is currently protected.
(This reminds me that I need to write that post I’ve been meaning to about the value I see in Twitter in general.)
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