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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?"
All this CEO is admitting is that he's unable to come up with a way to monetize his services without compromising people's privacy. The whole appeal of facebook, originally, was that it preserved privacy and kept the spammers to a minimum, when compared with MySpace. Now that Facebook is leaving one of its basic reasons for existing in the dust, someone else will come along and will replace it, and there'll be a mass migration to the latest thing. Just takes the next smart guy to create it. Perhaps it'll be based upon personal DRM. (Har har!) --Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Countdown to Zuckerberg's SSN being posted here in 3....2....
Thats all well and good Mark, but see there is this little problem, which is that 99% of all governments in the world (and probably 90% of all users on the internet) cant distinguish Internet from IRL and in fact are actively pushing them together in ways which should be quite alarming to long time net users. Lack of privacy would be fine if the government couldnt punish you for it, but they can. Every single legal system extant today has not sufficiently dealt with the realities of cheap and fast information, they were all constructed over hundreds (some times thousands for those of you living in countries following in the tradition of Roman law and Cannon law) of years where the basic assumption was the certain physical facts about the universe protected individuals from each other and from their government. That is no longer the case, and until it is we should all be very very cautious.
Please do not confuse correlation with causation.
Even if we ignore the causation argument, depression and mental illness are particularly difficult subjects to even correlate, as the criteria for diagnosis has changed considerably over the past several decades, as well as the rate of diagnosis given social stigmas and the availability of effective treatments (consider that, before Viagra, erectile dysfunction was considered to be extremely rare, as very few men would admit to having the condition, considering there was no effective treatment available)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
What you want is compartmentalization of your life. In the days of old, this wasn't so much expected, but these days it is.
I actually have several facebook accounts. One for goofing off. One for Friends and Family. One for work. And one for my extracurricular activities related to the website run.
I've specifically created these accounts because of rules and legal ramifications of having them mixed.
When someone can figure out how to get me a single account, with multiple access controls, then I'll consider using just ONE FB account.
I can't imaging trying to use Twitter like this.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The problem is that your friends disregard for their privacy translates into their disregard for your privacy, and suddenly a "reasonable person" no longer has an expectation of privacy."
Nope...fortunately my college days when drinking and ending up nekkid on the floor with a skull bong possibly in the back ground (someone elses house) were back in the days before the internet, and with 35mm cameras (no cell phones either). I made sure and got all the copies of the photos back then (hell, I was the one usually taking the pics)...and made sure I had all the negatives too.
Frankly, I'm just waiting for someone in my past to run for senator...then some of those party pics of them might come back out, unless I get a cushy job.
Right now...many of my friends that are privacy conscious, don't have facebook or anything like it...others that do, I've told NOT to put me in there, and they respect that.
I'd not join...especially with any real identifiable information....but so that I can reach others' sites...I thought about setting up an account with an untraceable nym email account....and only access it through TOR...figuring that would circumvent any way for them to trace me at Facebook.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This is a choice you made.
But that's the crux of the problem, isn't it: is that actually true?
Social networking sites such as Facebook rely on building a comprehensive network of information that affects each individual, much of which is provided indirectly and not by, or even with the consent of, that individual.
Privacy serves an important social function, and always has done. Modern technology, with its global communication systems and massive databases, is providing new ways to collect and process personal data that have profound implications for the preservation of privacy because of the combination of indirect sources now available.
But it probably takes a generation for society to understand such fundamental shifts in technological capabilities. In the meantime, technology marches on, and not everyone appreciates the significance of what they're doing by using it. Often, in the case of social networking, either those people are young and impressionable, or they simply aren't fully aware of important facts (something Facebook, in particular, is very good at being sneaky with).
[Zuckerberg] said that expectations had changed, and people now default to sharing online, not privacy.
Well, sure, this week, because they haven't worked it out yet. Get back to us in a few years. Social networking is by its nature a more resilient trend than those that have gone before, because it relies on peer pressure for its power. But even then, so far it's rare for any community-based site to survive as the trendy choice for very long. After a while, the novelty wears off, and people's scepticism about all-powerful services kicks in.
I expect both Google and Facebook to learn this the hard way in the not too distant future. My friends have long since stopped asking me to join services like Facebook. Recently, a small but growing number seem to be turning away, tired of the idea of sharing everything with hundreds of "friends" they don't really know as anything other than a profile picture and a news feed.
The fact that Facebook doesn't highlight when people leave and a lot of people have so many "friends" that they don't notice when some go missing is masking this effect, but that doesn't make it any less real. I'll wager people like Zuckerberg don't much like that idea.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.