The Evolving Notion Of Privacy In The Digital World

The continuing conversation about what privacy will look like in the digital age has found Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg justifying the network’s recent shift in privacy policies, pointing to the increasing number of services appearing that allow users to share more and more personal information.

Identifying a general shift in how we think about sharing information online, Zuckerberg states in a conversation with Michael Arrington:

“when I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all?’

He argues that this trend is bound to continue, that “why would I want to have my information accessible to everyone online?” is the new “why would I want to have a website?”

Once a defender of Facebook as a network driven by the privacy of its members, the criticism Zuckerberg currently faces is over recent default settings, from automatic opt-out privacy to opt-in.

On the other side of the evolving conversation is Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, who makes a valid case for why pre-2010 privacy still matters by pointing out how published content has historically existed in context, and arguing that the cultural shift Zuckerburg points to following is very much the result of Facebook itself:

By pushing your personal information and conversation through activity updates fully into the public, Facebook is eliminating any integrity of context that these conversations would naturally have. Posted updates can be directed only to limited lists of Facebook contacts, like college buddies or work friends, but that option is buried under more public default options and much of a user’s activity on the site is not subject to that kind of option.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used to say that people would share more information if they felt comfortable knowing that it would only be visible to people they trusted. He told me in an interview two years ago that users who wanted to do so couldn’t take their data off of the site because privacy control “is the vector around which Facebook operates.” Now apparently, he’s changed his mind. This weekend I argued that his justification for the new stance is not credible.

Read Write Web: “Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy Is Over”

[image by georgeogoodman]