The uproar surrounding privacy issues on the most popular social networking service, Facebook, continues unabated, this time thanks to a recent statement by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recently told the audience at the Crunchies Awards, rather boorishly, that internet users no longer expect or desire the level of privacy that was the case in the past.
Prepared by: Vanja Figenwald
‘When we started, people asked us, Why would I want to put any information on the internet at all,’ he told the audience, continuing that in the last five or six years, blogging has rapidly grown, meaning that people have become accustomed to sharing various forms of information more openly and with a larger number of people. The point of his claim was that Facebook follows such a trend in defining privacy settings that have recently been changed so much that even the founder himself initially had trouble determining which pictures would be publicly available and which would not on his profile. Of course, such a statement immediately caused an uproar among the vigilant guardians of internet privacy.
How right they are is quite another story. The fact is that Zuckerberg is perfectly right. No one is forcing people to go online and publish private information and pictures, to begin with. Secondly, on a global scale, exhibitionism and the sick desire of anonymous individuals to expose themselves to the wider public have reached unprecedented proportions and have become a key trend not only for the world of the internet, where it is out of control, but also for the public space as a whole. The cries of those who care about privacy on the internet actually somewhat resemble the complaints of celebrities who want the media to follow them only when they want it, but not when it does not suit them.
Thus, Kevin Bankston, a senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for the protection of fundamental rights in the world of technology, stated that he is surprised and concerned by Zuckerberg’s claims, especially considering that Facebook has personally contributed to the erosion of users’ sense of privacy, presumably the same ones who voluntarily join and ‘stick’ personal data on the internet, which is known to be the antithesis of the concept of privacy. The fundamental argument of opponents of Zuckerberg’s thesis seems to be the influence of Facebook on the sense of privacy, rather than the fact that his claim is valid, which, for a little more comparison, sounds equally convincing as a lawsuit from a passionate smoker against a tobacco company or an overweight person against McDonald’s.
