Mark Zuckerberg addressed the issue of privacy and informational openness on Facebook today in a blog post that was at once honest and ambiguous. Clearly there is a sense of ethical boundary within the Facebook organization, and that will likely create new barriers to the use of publicized information for businesses and services that utilize Facebook as a primary aggregation point for locating and researching target consumers.
Yet the more critical message in his post is that within the ethical boundaries outlined, there has been made a way for services not necessarily accessed by Facebook users that will be alternately accessing those users’ personal and consumer-category information. What this suggests is that while not any service can access any user’s information as it is entered into Facebook, every service will eventually be granted such access—legally, under the evolving terms and conditions of the site.
What do the new terms and conditions for Facebook mean to the privacy rights of individuals with a presence on the internet? Is this simply the development of a device that—eventually under government regulation and control—will strip us of any sense of individualism or personal confidentiality? Or can we expect to maintain a sense of privacy and the ability to ‘do what we want’ without the consequence of sacrificing any semblance of a private life? Even though we’re mostly aware that what we put online hardly ever stays private, it’s another issue that major, major organizations like Facebook are making it even simpler for us to be viewed not as people, but as units of measurement.
3 years ago