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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.
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.
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.
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
http://www.facebook.com/zuck
cat
...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
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.
Most of us aren't interesting enough to have friends post embarrassing pictures of us on the Internet. Besides that would require us to interact with other people, possibly including girls.