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Facebook Plunges Again
The Age of Privacy is NOT over
An article recently popped up on ReadWriteWeb covering Mark Zuckerberg's interview at the Crunchies. Unfortunately it starts on entirely the wrong foot: it puts words straight into the Facebook CEO's mouth. Words that he never says. He doesn't say the age of privacy is over, damnit, so how can you claim that he does? That's what they call sensationalism, ReadWriteWeb. Looking at the number of retweets and its rapid proliferation throughout the web, I'd say it was very well-executed too -- but it's still lies, damned lies.This is the premise: Zuckerberg is interviewed by Michael Arrington (video after the jump). Unsurprisingly the two topics that pop up are Facebook Connect and the privacy changes in 2009. Zuckerberg spends about a minute discussing the ongoing changes and why they've been instrumental to Facebook's continued domination, and fast becoming the most popular site on the Internet. Most of the interview is about how Facebook keeps ahead of the rest.
Now, he discusses privacy, but never at any stage does he suggest that The Age of Privacy is over. Notice how by giving it capital letters, it makes it sound more important than it really is. Nice work, ReadWriteWeb... for a high school kid.
Zuckerberg, for about 60 seconds between the third and fourth minute in the interview, talks about how the face of the Internet has changed. At Harvard, where he developed Facebook, people would ask him "Why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?" -- and that's how Facebook started: to connect us up with friends, family and classmates, but also to satisfy our need for privacy.
But that was then, and this is now. Blogging has bloomed. Lifecasting exposes your entire life with worrying candor. We're tweeting from the bathroom and befriending people on Facebook that we've only ever met while blind drunk. Put simply: current social norms have shifted. Whatever concern we had for absolute privacy has, for some of us, disappeared.
I don't know if this is a generational thing -- it's been a whole decade since the dot-com bubble, and 20 years since AOL and CompuServe first brought Internet to the homestead. Things are moving quickly. The average Internet user today isn't the same as five or even two years ago. I don't think people quite appreciate the magnitude of the speculation and calculated maneuvers Mark Zuckerberg has had to make to keep up with contemporary society. You're looking at the fastest-growing website in the world ever, ReadWriteWeb, and you have the brazen tenacity to put words into the CEO's mouth?
You could argue that we're no longer living in The Age of Privacy, but it certainly wasn't Facebook's doing: you can still lock your private details up as tightly as before. If anything this is the age of liberty and freedom, where you can share as much or as little as you like; where music and media is free and ideas are transferred at the speed of light. And It's all thanks to the worldwide connectivity provided by the Internet, and invaluable services like Facebook.
Comments
9
Subscribe to commentsRichardJan 11th 2010 10:02AM
Not quite. Yes you can still lock up your private details but this still doesn't stop your friends from posting pictures up on Facebook and tagging you with them.
Even if you've made a concious effort to avoid broadcasting what you do, where you go and who you socialise with - other people still do it for you.
That is the crux of the "age of privacy" argument.
Sebastian AnthonyJan 11th 2010 10:13AM
Last I checked you can untag yourself...!
I'm surprised the 'don't allow people to tag you' option hasn't appeared though, like it has on Flickr. Or maybe it exists and I haven't found it? I'll have to go look :)
MiguelJan 11th 2010 1:15PM
@Sebastian - That is one of the biggest privacy options missing from Facebook,,along with wall post approval, and the reason why I haven't used Facebook in almost a year.
Sebastian AnthonyJan 11th 2010 1:20PM
Yeah, I can imagine it's irritating for some.
I think I have my Facebook set up so that such notifications don't get broadcast though? Like, my friend requests and stuff like that are never put on my wall -- at least I THINK that's how it is...
It would be a very nice option to have though, that's for sure.
Jonathon HibbardJan 11th 2010 10:08AM
Yet one more reason why I don't even read ReadWriteWeb anymore. Their whole staff try to push their political ideas onto people, they put words in other people's mouths, and are just, quite honestly, a very unreliable source of information.
kojo87Jan 11th 2010 11:01AM
unless Mark Zuckerberg is an idiot (which i don't think he is) i don't think he would say that. it would just be bad for business.
The_DocJan 11th 2010 12:15PM
When you write an article, you want people to read it. You get that with grabby headlines. I don't see the problem.
Yes, RWW stretched 'people aren't as worried about posting personal info on the net as they used to be' into 'the age of privacy is over'. But no one would read an article entitled: Facebook's Zuckerberg Says People Aren't As Worried About Posting Personal Info on the Net as They Used to be'. RWW included Zuckerberg's actual words in the article, lest people be misled by the headline.
Plus, it doesn't take much to conclude the second from the first: if norms about posting personal info really have fundamentally shifted, maybe the 'age of privacy' IS over, in the sense that we no longer strongly value privacy. Its not that we can't choose settings that guard our privacy, its that we choose not to.
Whether this trend is as strong or as permanent as would be necessary to kill an age remains an open question. For my part, I'm part of the relevant generation but am very wary of sharing my life over the net. I have twitter and facebook accounts, but I never use them; I have them just to have them.
Sebastian AnthonyJan 11th 2010 1:24PM
I think there's always been people that don't value privacy as much as the next person.
It could also be argued that privacy is overrated -- is there really any harm, for 99.999% of people, to give out private info?
But I think that's beyond the scope of this conversation, or this site :)
MimzyJan 11th 2010 2:19PM
@The_Doc: "But no one would read an article entitled: Facebook's Zuckerberg Says People Aren't As Worried About Posting Personal Info on the Net as They Used to be'."
You are entirely correct here. However, that's not an excuse to put words into somebody's mouth and mislead readers. If the author of that blog post has problems getting readers WITHOUT deceptive headlines, maybe he shouldn't be a blogger.