Privacy Today & The Facebook Riots

The web and social media is challenging our everyday definitions of privacy and secrecy. A month ago, college social networking site Facebook added a function that they thought complemented the distribution of user content - the users didn’t think so and 700,000 of them banded together to protest. Bruce Sneier has an interesting piece on this event and reflects on what privacy means today - whether we like it or not.

Earlier this month, the popular social networking site Facebook learned a hard lesson in privacy. It introduced a new feature called "News Feeds" that shows an aggregation of everything members do on the site, such as added and deleted friends, a change in relationship status, a new favorite song, a new interest. Instead of a member’s friends having to go to his page to view any changes, these changes are all presented to them automatically. The outrage was enormous. One group, Students Against Facebook News Feeds, amassed over 700,000 members. Members planned to protest at the company’s headquarters… Welcome to the complicated and confusing world of privacy in the information age…

The Facebook example illustrates, privacy is much more complex. It’s about who you choose to disclose information to, how, and for what purpose. And the key word there is "choose." People are willing to share all sorts of information, as long as they are in control.

When Facebook unilaterally changed the rules about how personal information was revealed, it reminded people that they weren’t in control. Its 9 million members put their personal information on the site based on a set of rules about how that information would be used. It’s no wonder those members — high school and college kids who traditionally don’t care much about their own privacy — felt violated when Facebook changed the rules.

Wired

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