Blame The Users -or- Why You Might Be Stupid
A lot has been made of the recent (and not so recent) changes to Facebook privacy standards. New York Times has graphs depicting the incredibly byzantine privacy options. Influential tech podcaster Leo Laporte deleted his account because “you have two choices, quit Facebook or just assume everything on Facebook you do is out in the open and behave accordingly” (paraphrased by his show notes). Peter Rojas, the cofounder of tech blogs Engadget and Gizmodo, also deleted his account, saying on Twitter, “The issue is that users should have real control over what is shared, that’s all. FB keeps taking that away.” What confuses me about the whole backlash is that no one seems to be willing to say that a lot of Facebook users are too stupid and lazy to deserve the privacy they seem to crave.
Now I am not exactly go go Facebook. I didn’t have an account until I needed one for Fancy Pants Gangsters, and it has been only in the last few months that it has become a regular fixture of my daily web use. Much like Twitter, I use it to not only to keep connected with news (I tend to friend a lot of journalists and writers) but to interact with our listeners. I support efforts like Diaspora, which seeks to create a more open competitor to Facebook, and I think Facebook deserves all the grief it has been getting related to privacy concerns. And Mark Zuckerberg, the 26 year old billionaire founder of Facebook, is a egotistic douche with the distinction of having the most punchable face in tech.
But at what point can we start blaming the users for creating the situation we are now in? The free Web is the most small d democratic forum that has ever existed in all of human history. Everyone can take part, and everyone has a stake in the outcome. The Web is the sum total of all the efforts, all the information, and all the activity of the public, and as George Carlin once said, “maybe its the public that sucks“. Blaming the heads of Facebook for the privacy problems on the web is like blaming the gun manufacturers for school shootings. At some point it is up to the public to stop posting things that they don’t want other people to know about. It isn’t Facebook’s fault this person is a moron. Or these people.
Leo is right, you have to assume that everything you post online can and will be seen by everyone. The fact this is a deep thought or a brilliant deduction boggles my mind. Even non-tech people should know this by now. How many news articles contain pictures posted on Facebook? How many Law And Order episodes have centered around information found online? If anything, the vastly out of skew portrayal of the online world in major media should have cultivated a much deeper sense of paranoia, and yet people are shocked when their drunken escapades somehow wind up in the hands of their bosses, family, or soon-to-be-ex girlfriends.
There has got to be a point where we just assume that the entirety of online business is based around advertising, just like television and radio are. If a company wants your information, they want it so it is easier to sell you something. Facebook doesn’t want your drunken photos because it wants to embarrass you. It wants you to be comfortable because if you are comfortable enough to post your drunken photos, you are comfortable enough to talk about that cute purse you bought or that game you are playing because then they can start selling you purses and games. Be smart, and good things will happen. If you get burned by not being smart, you deserve everything you get.