Facebook Fracas Reveals Soft Underbelly of Internet Privacy

The recent fracas at Facebook-where members rebelled over introduction of a new feature that aggregated all their activity on the site and presented it as a news feed-is a glimpse into the future of privacy on the Internet. We’ve all got a lot to learn about our online life and the consequences of making our foibles so easy for anyone to find in the future. We’ve all heard stories already about employers Googling prospective employees and rejecting applicants based on what they read in blog postings. This is just the tip of the iceberg, though.

A blog is supposed to be a public forum. But what about that data we willingly surrendered, never imagining that it would become public? Who’s ever read YouTube’s policy (anything you post is theirs)? Or Facebook’s? Or Amazon’s? What happens to all the information you surrender to those sites? And how about what you surrender to your university alumni association? Welcome to the present—and the future.

“Lessons from the Facebook Riots”is a cogent exploration of these issues. Perhaps the most important point is this one:

But public perception is important. The lesson here for Facebook and other companies—for Google and MySpace and AOL and everyone else who hosts our e‑mails and webpages and chat sessions—is that people believe they own their data. Even though the user agreement might technically give companies the right to sell the data, change the access rules to that data or otherwise own that data, we—the users—believe otherwise. And when we who are affected by those actions start expressing our views—watch out.

Another important point is that we users, all of us, need to pay attention to what companies do with our information and expect that we have control over how it’s used.