We are being conned.

We are constantly being treated to a Wordle soup of ideas and buzzwords about privacy and the transparency of social media.

We argue over terms like Age of Privacy as a way to deflect from the reasons for the discussions in the first place.

Privacy is a reflection of respect we have for one another. Public-ness is the gravy train marketers want to hop on. It is the train that services like Facebook want to be the only conductor of.

Dana Boyd has the better analogy:

Let’s take this scenario for a moment. Bob trust Alice. Bob tells Alice something that he doesn’t want anyone else to know and he tells her not to tell anyone. Alice tells everyone at school because she believes she can gain social stature from it. Bob is hurt and embarrassed. His trust in Alice diminishes. Bob now has two choices. He can break up with Alice, tell the world that Alice is evil, and be perpetually horribly hurt. Or he can take what he learned and manipulate Alice. Next time something bugs him, he’ll tell Alice precisely because he wants everyone to know. And if he wants to guarantee that it’ll spread, he’ll tell her not to tell anyone.

Facebook isn’t in the business of protecting Bob. Facebook is in the business of becoming Alice. Facebook is perfectly content to break Bob’s trust because it knows that Bob can’t totally run away from him. They’re still stuck in the same school together. But, more importantly, Facebook *WANTS* Bob to twist Facebook around and tell it stuff that it’ll spread to everyone. And it’s fine if Bob stops telling Facebook the most intimate stuff, as long as Bob keeps telling Facebook stuff that it can use to gain social stature.

Facebook, and other services like it, can’t afford privacy. Its business model is built around us all being mindless blabber-mouths. It needs us to believe that privacy is an archaic ideology. It needs us all to be Bob’s.

Facebook wants to be able to serve us all up like some buffet at a marketer’s smorgasbord restaurant. Where we might want a fine dining experience Facebook’s business relies on convincing us all we really want an all the wings you can eat at Hooter’s experience.

Social Media isn’t a battle about privacy and openness. However that is what we are being conned into believing.