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The Implications of a Facebook Society
FloatsomNJetsom writes "The site Switched.com is taking a look at the slow death of privacy at the hands of social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace with a link to a report on the creepy practice of Facebook employees monitoring what pages you look at and a thought-provoking video interview with social media expert Clay Shirky — who says that social networks are profoundly changing our ability to keep our private lives private. 'Eventually, Shirky theorizes, society will have to create a space that's implicitly private even though it's technically public, not unlike a personal conversation held on a public street. Otherwise, our ability to keep our lives private will be forever destroyed. Of course, that might already be the case.'"
I don't think that sites like Facebook are "profoundly changing our ability to keep our private lives private." Rather, they're changing our ability to make our public lives more public. This is an important distinction, since these social sites make it quite clear by design that you are sharing your information with your friends and acquaintances. If people really wanted to keep the fact that they got smashed and rode horseback on their friend private, they'd just open up notepad and type away. Instead, they decide to broadcast that on a social website so their friends can see their drunken antics. Don't take this to mean that I condone the practice of Facebook employees (or gov't agents for the tin-foil hat crowd) browsing private profiles. There is an implication of semi-privacy if I set my profile to be viewable by friends only. If a potential employer sees Johnny McDrunkeverynight's public pictures and decides not to hire Johnny, fine. Maybe he shouldn't have used the megaphone (social websites) to broadcast his machismo.
Saying that you can simply refrain from posting the details of your private life to the Internet misses part of the point here. To communicate with many of my friends, who insist on using social networking sites as their main avenues for staying in touch with friends, I am forced to use a privately-owned network where many of my rights may be waived. You could say, of course, that I should not stay in contact with those friends, but in real life it is not so easy to make such demands, especially when we are talking about communicating with relatives and dear friends, often in cases where communication is essential, such as family emergencies. Pragmatically, it just isn't always feasible to say "use the public internet and the (broken) standards for email."
The phenomena is similar to the shrinking amount of public space in the United States: A popular tourist destination in the city where I live used to be public property, and anyone could come with a sign and a cause and exercise their right to free speech -- including criticizing the government that maintained the large, open-air space. Within the past decade, the city sold the land and put the space under private management, and now one cannot go and peacefully exercise their right to free speech -- the private owner has far greater effective and legal discretion over what happens on their land. Most of us must move quite a bit through the space around them -- roads, offices, parks, hospitals, stores, and even virtual spaces -- and the ownership (common, corporate, or individual) has an effect on what we do and say, and what others can do and say to us.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
I agree. Now, a big part of the problem isn't you screaming what you consider private. Is that you can't control a crowd of known idiots shouting in public every little detail they know about you. Specially when such sites as Facebook don't require your authorization when other people post about you. Regardless of your authorization, if they post it, "they" know.
On the other hand, if you don't appear at all in any social site, that would sure make you a prime suspect to any NSA agent who would and should order further research on your social habits, probably digging more deep than you would ever wanted to.
"Don't post it" is a good default option, but these sites are too useful to just ignore like that. At one very basic level, Facebook is an address book: you put in your address and phone number and email in, restrict that information to friends and add people you are okay having it. The result, potentially, is an address book that updates itself automatically as people change their numbers and email/street addresses.
Imagine that tied in with your phone, and you have something interesting. And FB has many other interesting and potentially interesting uses - the photo tagging is very nifty and the event organising also useful. But you have to be careful about security if you don't want to get bitten on the ass, and being careful with security is not so easy (or perhaps just not so natural) for the non-tech crowd.
As a consequence, there will be a grass-roots surge of enthusiasm for "internet privacy legislation", as all the young dolts who have posted videos of their misdeeds start to seriously worry about getting a job.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
'Eventually, Shirky theorizes, society will have to create a space that's implicitly private even though it's technically public, not unlike a personal conversation held on a public street. Reminds of a sitcom episode - I think Boy Meets World or Growing Pains. No it was Blossom. Joey, Blossom's goofy brother, gets caught cheating on a test. So he spends all this time trying to find undetectable ways to cheat. He finally decides to hide the answers in the one place only he can look and that the teachers can't see - in his mind. We are perfectly capable of keeping things private if we choose to do so. The problem I have is when other people give up their privacy, or maybe even a piece of their privacy - and that is used as an argument for that person to surrender their remaining privacy or for everyone else to surrender their privacy as well. We all have the right to determine what is private for ourselves.