Essay

Privacy on the Internet

By Benjamin Woodward

As the saying goes, there's nothing certain but death and taxes. Recently, though, I've come to suspect there's a third item to be added to this list: the Facebook user who complains endlessly about Facebook. It's remarkable just how common they are, and how, with a cuckoo clock regularity, the inevitable anti-Facebook tirade begins. The simple question, "Then why don't you stop using it?" doesn't stop them; in fact, it usually has the opposite effect.

I don't have strong feelings about Facebook. No anger, irritation, frustration. No unspoken resentment that a 27-year-old highly intelligent Harvard dropout like Mark Zuckerberg now has an estimated personal wealth of $17.5 billion because of it. It's there, so I use it. But the complaints focused on Facebook are as various as its roughly 800 million members: anything from frustration at having to read the countless banal status updates of "friends" you barely know to claims that it demeans the notion of friendship.

Privacy, though, is the main source of anguish. This can be a simple matter of a photo or status update being seen by those who shouldn't have seen it. Thus, the employee who had called in sick only to have his Facebook photos of his trip to the Caribbean give away his true location to his employers.

Or it could be the more serious issue of the abuse of personal information. For instance, passing on personal information to third parties, such as advertisers. Facebook recently ran into trouble with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission -- as did Google and Twitter -- for sharing information that it had led users to believe was private. It has since apologized and fixed its privacy controls.

Still, I'm left with the thought that if you don't want intimate information to be shared online then why voluntarily post such information on a social networking site, of all places? The Internet wasn't created for privacy. So, isn't the best solution just to keep private information offline?

Perhaps this question reveals my age. The Internet has changed the very concept of privacy over the past two decades. For instance, someone in their 30s has a very different idea of privacy compared to someone in their teens. Millennials, after all, have been brought up with blogs, social networks, YouTube and the like. They've been conditioned to expect an audience for every bit of their lives they share online.

Some say this will lead to the concept of privacy becoming outdated, and that no one will see any difference between the public and the private. It's a terrifying thought, although I doubt it will ever reach that extreme. The boundaries between private and public may regularly be redrawn but those boundaries will always exist, and so long as Facebook and social networking sites remain, the debate will continue.

Shukan ST: JANUARY 20, 2012

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