Why people really do care about privacy
I am writing this while wearing a rather cool sweatshirt that I put on for the occasion. I bought it at a 70 percent reduction. It is sort of a beige color, and it has a weird diagonal zip. It was designed by an Austrian.
What else would you like to know? I'll tell you anything. I want to be a truly modern human. A model human, really--one who just doesn't care what people know about me. One who will divulge anything to anyone. (Which, incidentally, many Europeans believe is exactly what Americans do on first meeting.)
You see, I have been empowered by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and now by a very thoughtful piece by CNET's Declan McCullagh, to cast off my inhibitions and lay it all out there. Yes, I once had a crush on Sandra Bullock. I'm over it now. She prefers men with tattoos. It annoyed me.
It indeed seems that no one cares about privacy anymore. I was the last. I held out. But, honestly, what good will it do me, now that I know so that many people are using Google Buzz and loving it? Truly, I should get over myself and post a video of me doing it.
What McCullagh said so perfectly is that "Internet users have grown accustomed to informational exhibitionism." The things you see on the Web make your nostril hair recede back into your head. The blogs about peeing cats and feudal worship make me realize that this is the world of egotism gone digitally rampant.
I must confess, though, as I prepare to remove my nonmatching socks and my sweatshirt (it's getting warm out here), that I have a couple of concerns as I enter this new age.
It seems that every time I hear people telling me that privacy is just so Jim Reeves, it's precisely those who stand to make quite a lot of money out of saying so. Whenever I am about to do something questionable--you know, like taking my lobster for a walk--I hear Eric Schmidt's words to CNBC like a tremulous tinnitus in my ears: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Then I turn to my lobster and whisper, "Not today, Shirley."
Schmidt, on the other hand, got rather upset with CNET's Elinor Mills when she did a quick Google search of his name. And according to some people at Gawker, he also tried to take down a blog, written by an alleged former paramour.
Perhaps I am just misunderstanding. Then again, the same questioning people at Gawker seemed to cause Facebook's Zuckerberg, at the time that his company changed its privacy settings, to have his photos made more, well, private after the site published some of them from his suddenly very public Facebook page.
I know I am slow about all of this. It seems that perhaps this is because I am over 30 (though I am not sure if my girlfriend is--does that count?). Apparently, younger generations are more au fait with being technologically blase.
I tested this out, in true Google fashion. I researched it. I asked a good 18-year-old friend of mine whether he had, you know, been going out with that girl I saw him with last week. He told me a little, in a very guarded way. But when I asked a more probing follow-up, he looked at me as if I had just smeared salsa on his iPhone and was trying to scrape it off with a tortilla chip. We're friends--socially networked. We even text each other. But he wasn't having it.
My favorite painting. I just wanted you to know that.
(Credit: Chris Matyszczyk)I know that technology changes the way we behave. (You should see how my new juicer suddenly makes me prefer juice over water.) I know that generations all have their own quirks, habits, and norms. But here's where my real, entirely backward suspicions lie. With Google's Buzz and Facebook's Beacon, for example, it was hard to resist the notion that the creators were trying to bypass any potential privacy objections by putting the onus on real people to notice and be bothered to do something about it.
It was your job to care, not theirs. And that doesn't feel like the best customer service, even for products that cost you nothing at all.
Facebook and Google take great pride (at least, publicly) from caring about their users. But when it comes to respecting their users' privacy, they do seem woefully slow. If there would be no privacy to respect, of course, no one would complain at all, but complain they do. More than that, I believe that some people are becoming increasingly careful about what they post and how they post it. Social networking still gives you a choice. You should know what that choice really is.
It may well be that there are 9 million Buzz posts already out there in the universe, but how many of them are deeply personal? And is it possible that, with all the uproar, those people posting are finally, fully aware that their musings will be public? Would it really have been so difficult for Google and Facebook (with both Beacon and the latest privacy settings) to make clear what it is they were proposing and explain fully the ramifications of their ideas? Might it have been an idea to ask how real people felt about it before launch? It would have taken simple words, simple layouts--you know, like Twitter.
The fact that they didn't suggests not that no one cares about privacy, but that privacy gets in the way of these companies' goals. With Buzz and Beacon, the companies revealed that their enthusiasm for forced mass involvement--leading to commercial advantages--far outweighed any thoughts of privacy.
I don't want a CEO telling me what the social norms are, as if I am too dumb to work them out for myself--especially when his primary motivation is financial, not social. If Facebook could make more money from increasing your privacy (and it declared just two years ago that privacy was "the vector around which Facebook operates"), you can bet that an increased need for privacy would suddenly be declared the social norm.
Yes, social networking has helped people get used to certain stuff being made more immediately public than it used to be. For the majority of people, that includes only certain stuff--the same stuff they would have been happy communicating to their friends before Facebook and Google came along: their pictures (but only some), their news (but only some of it), their holidays (but not all details), their friendships (but not necessarily what gets discussed). Is it really true that everyone has become a social exhibitionist? If it were true, if it were generational, why is it that this supposed Generation X-hibitionist seems so darned conservative?
People care about privacy because having a private life makes them feel like people, rather than billboards. It's an essence of humanity, as we currently know it, that we only allow certain people to see more of who we really are, what we really do, what we really think, and how we really feel. There are many reasons for that. One of them is that we don't really trust other people all that much.
If all of our information were made public, wouldn't we all become just a little too predictable? This--remarkably coincidental--is exactly what algorithm worshipers would love: "We know who you are. We know what you think. We know what you like. So you'll definitely buy this product, won't you?"
There are worried people out there in the foggy world who have been at the forefront of creating the most important technologies--Jaron Lanier, one of the creators of virtual reality, for example. In his brilliant book "You Are Not a Gadget," Lanier showed how very concerned he is that imperfect technologies are increasingly trying to dictate human behavior.
If privacy really has been tossed away like a dollar to a beggar, shouldn't I first have the right to know everything about those who want my information, rather than the other way around? Shouldn't Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, and others reveal their innermost thoughts and actions on a daily basis, thereby proving their supposedly incontrovertible theses? Instead, they don't seem so keen.
Their businesses aren't based on mere technological excellence. They are based on trust. Strangely, Google's Schmidt seems to believe that we should trust his company because, well, he says so. At a recent media conference in Abu Dhabi, Fortune reported, someone said this to applause: "All this information that you have about us...Does that scare everyone in this room?"
Schmidt's response: "Would you prefer someone else?...Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?"
Strangely, perhaps there might be. If Google revealed itself completely, real people might trust it just a little more. The company would be setting an example, like a true evangelist, that others could follow.
McCullagh quoted federal judge Richard Posner as saying, "As a social good, I think privacy is greatly overrated because privacy basically means concealment. People conceal things in order to fool other people about them."
Am I really trying to fool you by not telling you the color of both of my socks? Or might I not want you to take advantage of my bad taste? Might I not want to burden you with the information, just in case you want to rush out and buy me two socks, both of the same color? Might I not want you to know what I wear around the house, so that it doesn't encourage you to come here and knock on my door and gawk at me? When it comes to privacy, who's fooling whom? And why are social-network leaders so keen to believe it is dead?
In one sense, though, Posner is right: privacy is about concealment. It's one of the only powers we feel we hold in an often-difficult world. I don't want you to know what is (or isn't) in my bedroom. Jennifer Aniston doesn't want you to know about her relationship with Gerard Butler (until she does). And Facebook and Google don't want you to be reminded that their real intention is to make capital from your quite natural, modern, cool decision to suddenly stop caring about your privacy. You see, they'd prefer to keep that to themselves.
Do you mind if I put my socks back on now? I'm suddenly feeling chilly.
Chris Matyszczyk is an award-winning creative director who advises major corporations on content creation and marketing. He brings an irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes ironic voice to the tech world. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
What's more, its not as simple as a telephone call from The NSA to Mark Zuckerberg.
What's actually going on is good old covert infiltration into these companies, into key jobs that decide, let's say privacy policy.
They are managing to change the minds of let's say Mark Zuckerberg.
What's to note though that inbetween this covert policy changing, is officials from intelligence agency's also approaching Zuckerberg at industry conferences to further cement the idea of "no privacy" into the CEO's mind set.
In other words, the guy is being brainwashed.
Remember, its well documented that he was anti-disclosure of personal information before Facebook was fully infiltrated by multiple country intelligence agency actors and before it was used en masse by the internet community.
As soon as Facebook became intelligence agency purpose he was just a normal guy not bothered about switching to evil "no privacy" mode, then something, somewhere, somehow, convinced him, yes all your personal information should belong to the web, stalkers and government signals intelligence agencys.
Facebook is no longer his, its run by the people who he has employed, that so happen to work for the government, who so happen to want Facebook to disclose its users personal lives to the world!
And guess the reason for this "no privacy" agenda? Yes, terrorism, 9/11 and the failed christmas day bomber.
Can you believe our governments of the world allow such terrorists who bomb us through terrorist attacks to change the way we behave on the internet, to disclose all our personal information, just to prove we're not a terrorist?
Surely we are all innocent until proven guilty! Not anymore, we are all held on the database for life.
And not only are we held on the database, we are increasingly being exposed to the public domain to decide if we are a terrorist, a criminal or just an ordinary joe.
There is nothing to fear if you are doing nothing wrong. Remember that.
Or so we are led to believe.
...
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
jws
It was actually pretty good and brings up a good counter to the "Why no one really cares about privacy" article.
I basically agree with most of what you said.
If you have something to hide that is so daming, or hush hush, & that u do not want
any1 to know about, well, then think before you type .. it is still called the World Wide Web
for cryin out loud :)
My advice would be: don't trust Google, don't trust Facebook... and don't trust the government. Keep it to yourself if it is important. Most people already follow that advice which is why Google's search results and Facebook are just so full of junk and useless material.
So glad to learn about you, I love your approach and voice. Question for you: Is the painting your art? That says everything!!! I am going to re-post to my fan page and would like to use in a blog post as well. How would you like to be credited? To learn more about me: socialbling.org and facebook.com/conversationsocialbling.
Hullo. Thank you.
Yes, the credit remains as it does here. I am responsible for what's on the canvas. It's part of a collection called "Don't You Have Anything Better To Do?"
Chris
Not to belittle any of that, but I just have to say... "smeared salsa on his iPhone and was trying to scrape it off with a tortilla chip..." tears of laughter are running down my face!
Thank you. It's very kind of you to laugh.
I hope your primary motivation this weekend has been social, rather than financial.
Chris
"I hope your primary motivation this weekend has been social, rather than financial"
Exceopt for the fact that I had to work on Saturday... I'm still trying to figure that out...
(Speaking of work, after over 20 years in the financial industry, I understand the value of privacy)
xarophti
I did, after pointing out the likelihood of this resulting in harm to himself, invite one of their more vitriolic defenders to publically post his name and address and see how big a deal his privacy was then with the full expectation that there was no way in hell he'd ever do so. I think someone at CNet must have read it as a direct threat though because the comment got pulled without explanation.
Love the humor...still smiling!!
Love the humor...still smiling!!
- by tonylukac April 1, 2010 6:42 PM PDT
- If we shouldn't be concerned about privacy, why doesn't the NSA divulge all its secrets. They aren't doing anything wrong, are they?
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