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Facebook's Zuckerberg Says Forget Privacy
judgecorp writes "Privacy is no longer a social norm, according to the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Speaking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco, the entrepreneur said that expectations had changed, and people now default to sharing online, not privacy. It's all right for him, but does he mean it's ok for bodies like the UK government to monitor all citizens' Internet use?"
What he's saying is it is his customers (advertisers not users) want less privacy, so they can target ads more profitably.
"Privacy is no longer a social norm ...". I suppose that's correct. Stupidity and ignorance have replaced it, among other things. But that's ok with me as long as I continue to have a choice. Besides, those new "norms" can make for good entertainment.
Do your own thing. And overdo it!
Whatever you have ever said or done will continue to be used against you for the rest of your life. That is the world this kind of thinking creates. It creates fear to think or act. Privacy is ultimately about liberty.
If privacy is such an outdated concept, Mr. Zuckerberg, why can't I see your friends list, your photos, or just about anything else on your Facebook page? Set everything to public on your own page, show everyone how silly privacy concerns are.
People still expect privacy, even Facebook/MySpace/whatever users. They just suffer from two things, an assumption that the Social Media outlets act in a responsible way keeping the information they submit confidential and a general misunderstanding that putting information on the Internet without any controls now makes that private information very public.
People friend their friends on Facebook and blab about whatever as they would if they were talking to this person directly in a private context. They don't see that they have submitted the information where it is viewable and searchable by everyone and is being recorded and analyzed by the company for later sale as statistics. This is an indication of technology moving faster then the average person keeps up with, not that everyone is suddenly ok with being monitored.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
People do have an expectation of privacy that is at odds with what has been happening on the Internet. *Specifically* social networking sites like Facebook where there are real names attached to accounts and visible out in the open.
I feel privileged to live in Canada where we've enshrined some of our expected privacy into law to fight assholes like this. I hope the United States follows suit someday.
Facebook.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Facebook is designed from the ground up to be nonprivate. Since it doesn't allow you to distinguish between "work friends" and "party friends" and "closet friends", anyone with a brain will only post lowest-common-denominator acceptable comments to FB. If everyone is treating Facebook that way, there's no benefit to be gained by adding privacy to interactions that are already self-sanitized.
But there are *plenty* of social interactions that *do* require an expectation of privacy, ranging from private sexual lives to the mere fact that I don't want my work colleagues to know about my Warcraft friends, or vice versa. But Zuckerberg doesn't see these sides of people, because they're not on Facebook.
Jumping from "Facebook interactions don't need privacy" to "our society doesn't need privacy" is a fallacy of composition.
But false to fact.
The young generally have little experience with privacy and why it's important. Until they get bit by the consequences of excessive disclosure. Then they learn to value it.
(It's not just Gen-Y-ers. It happened to me, and I'm a boomer - which means I predate the Internet by a bunch. B-b)
Zuckerberg's business consists of making a lot of money by catering to those who have yet to learn the lesson. And management positions attract those for whom telling the truth when a lie is more convenient is also not a social norm. Of COURSE he'll make such claims. And they're sheer self-serving puffery.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I think it's less that people are willing to sacrifice privacy for self-aggrandizement, but rather that they do not stop to analyze the implications to their privacy of what they are about to post.
Joe sixpack does not wonder about how posting pictures of naked portions of his anatomy may affect his ability to find a job in 5 years time.
Keep fucking with my privacy settings. Keep on assuming that I want to share everything with every jerkoff on Facebook. I'll just keep locking my shit down. And if you want to make that impossible, know that I lived happily without Facebook once. I can easily remember how to do so again. Remember your place while you still have one.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Because I use my Facebook account to share events in my life, does not mean I am not concealing events in my life.
I have an expectation of privacy. Especially in real life. I do not have the same expectations of privacy in public, or with information I post via internet servers which I do not own or control. There seems to be a lot of attempts to indoctrinate the youth with the concept that their lives are subject to peer review at all times. I disagree with these motives and find them totalitarian in nature.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
Zuckerberg is trying to cover his ass. His site can't or won't provide proper access controls. His customers, the advertisers, don't want you to have privacy from them. So Mr. Zuckerberg, calling himself a 'prophet,' no less, tells you that you don't want privacy. But of course, Mr. Zuckerberg still wants his own privacy, and this 'no more privacy' world does not include corporations or governments, only individuals. Is there some easy way to find out who is advertising on facebook? No, and you can't find out what deals have been made regarding your information. So, privacy still exists, for those who can afford it. But not for us. Thank you Prophet Zuckerberg.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Here's the problem - they are attempting to change society's "reasonable expectation of privacy." Many laws are based on this social expectation. For example, the police have the ability to execute warrantless searches if they see something "in plain sight." That "plain sight" element is coupled to your expectation of privacy - you put said item into plain sight, thus you have no expectation of privacy regarding it. If you go to a public park, your expectation of privacy is reduced because of the venue. Facebook is attempting to alter the rules regarding what "normal" expectations are. They will do this without your consent, and rip your privacy out from under you.
... and sometimes fight for.
Like your freedom, privacy is something you have to earn
...is 25 years old. One of the sentences in TFA begins "When I was in my dorm room at Harvard."
So, a rich, successful, right-place-at-place-at-the-right-time twentysomething makes a self-serving comment born out of the hubris and inexperience of youth. This is like Paris Hilton saying "It doesn't matter what you do, as long as its *hot*" and it is only newsworthy because Paris Hilton isn't in a position to take a great deal of the intellectual capital I've invested in Facebook and simply passing it to whomever suits her fancy. Perhaps some of Zuckerberg's older business partners could recommend that he shut up.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. -Richard Feynman
The problem is that they pretend to be securing you, when the reality is that it's a bathroom door level of security. A reasonably nerdy middle school kid can burn through facebook security.
facebook didnt build a good security foundation, now they're paying for it.
Storm
If this twat thinks that privacy is no longer a social norm, where's the video's of him masturbating to pictures of George Orwell? The blog describing his plushy fantasies. The tweets giving everyone blow-by-blow updates to the size of his bank balance.
The reality is that even the unthinking morons that post pics/vids/words of themselves doing cringeworthy, career-limiting, dumb shit, STILL make a choice about what to post. There's still plenty of stuff that they don't want ANYONE knowing. The line may have moved over the last 20 years, but it hasn't disappeared.
Mark only shares some of his profile information with everyone.
About Me: i'm trying to make the world a more open place.
what a fuck wad.
Joe sixpack has nothing to worry about if he sends a photograph of his genitals to some random website. That is not really where the privacy problems of Facebook come up.
We are guaranteed the right to privacy to protect us from the government. Tyranny cannot exist when the government cannot pry open arbitrary aspects of the lives of the citizens -- tyrannical laws cannot be enforced if people can simply hide their activities. Unfortunately, this interpretation of privacy rights has been largely forgotten, and most people now think of privacy rights as a protection for criminals, if they even bother to think about their rights at all.
However, the law can only grant rights to the people; nobody can be forced to exercise them. These days, fewer and fewer people are bothering to keep any part of their lives private, and they are not stopping to think about the implications of mass numbers of people abandoning their rights. Worse, even those who do want privacy are finding it harder and harder to maintain, as their friends often post information online that they would not have posted themselves.
Facebook by its very design worsens the situation. Facebook is designed not just to collect data, but also metadata which allows our privacy to be violated in an entirely new way. Information about our lives can be deduced from the metadata that Facebook is collecting, even information that we did not deliberately post to Facebook. It is possible to categorize not just who is friends with whom, but how close that friendship is, and in some cases even more details about the nature of friendship can be obtained. This information has never been truly secret of course, but Facebook is amassing it all, allowing the information to be accessed with ease and without arousing suspicious: whereas it once required a detective to infiltrate a social circle to extract this data, it can now be accessed without any field work.
No, Facebook on its own will not lead to tyranny. It is the general trend, of which Facebook is not just a major enabler, but which Facebook is actively encouraging, that is the problem here.
Palm trees and 8
More the point:
Just because people do it with his product and he wants them to do it more so he makes more money selling data to various interested parties (governments, marketing firms, think tanks, NGOs, lobby groups, industry insiders etc) doesn't make it right.
His bias towards having people use Facebook more is so obvious I don't know why he bothered. It'd be like Darl McBride saying "forget free software because fully commodified IP is the new norm" or something else equally transparent.
Fuck Zuckerberg and fuck his agenda to destroy the personal space.
I hate printers.