Boy do we have some pretty strange concepts of what privacy is when it comes to the Web, or rather we seem to be misunderstanding exactly what privacy is.
No this is not a post in defense of Facebook and their anal attitude about controlling the flow of information. Nor is it a post extolling the virtues of new projects like Diaspora or other Facebook replacements (in their dreams maybe) who are selling themselves by tauting their belief in your right to privacy.
This post isn’t about either of those things because we’re talking about the wrong thing. This so-called uproar over what Facebook has been doing with its Open Graph and social plugins has nothing to do with privacy. It is all a case of verbal and ideological misdirection.
Look, privacy is a nice ideology and plays well in the headlines and courtrooms but when it comes to the Web and especially the Social Web using the word privacy is a misnomer. Privacy, or rather private are those things in our lives whether they be thoughts or conversations that exists within a certain set of parameters.
What happens in our bedrooms is considered to be private. What happens within the four walls of our homes is considered private. Conversations with our doctors, our lawyers is considered to be private. What is said in a confessional is considered to be private between you, the priest and God.
Anything beyond that is either governed by the laws of the land or is, depending on how much you can control the flow, consider to be public. I’ve written about this before but it gets frustrating to see the same things being said over and over again – things that have no business being in the discussion.
The fact is that the Social Web (of for you marketing folks – Social Media) is anything but private. It was never meant to be private. The whole philosophy of the Social Web is about openness and transparency. There is no private in the Social Web.
Now before you go off the deep end it is important to understand privacy and controlling the flow and access of your information are not the same thing. Look the moment you step into the Social Web through your browser or what ever desktop, or mobile, apps anything you put out there should be considered by default to be public.
That doesn’t mean however that you shouldn’t be able to control who sees, hears, or reads what you put out there. This is where the real argument should be happening because that is what services like Facebook, Twitter and even Google are trying to do. They want to be the ones who control the access and flow of your information as it enters the Social Web.
With Facebook – at least in the beginning – we felt safe storing our stuff within their walls because they promised that we would easily be able to allow what information we wanted to be seen by the people we wanted to see it. Plus we were all secure in the knowledge that Facebook was just one big home – the home where everything would stay out of the way of prying eyes.
The problem is that Facebook couldn’t make all the gobs of money that it needed so it changed the rules and in the process made it harder – to the point of incomprehensible – to know how we could control the access to our information. What has helped Facebook immensely is that the majority of people are more than willing to abdicate their control over their information flow to those who they think know best.
The truth of the matter is that just about everyone is more than willing to share things about themselves with the wider web. What is becoming more of a concern though is the fact that we don’t seem to have any control over what is done with information anymore. We don’t have a say in who can see it or read it.
We want to be the ones who control where our information go, who can read it, and what they can do with it. It isn’t a matter of privacy – it is a matter of controlling the flow of what we decide to share. This is where the fight is, this is where we need to make our stand.
