Over the weekend, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made some remarks about online privacy, which sparked a still raging debate over the increasingly public nature of "personal" information,
whether Facebook is directly responsible, and whether consumers should have a say in whole the matter.
"Has society become less private or is it Facebook that's pushing people
in that direction?"
asks ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick, adding that, "Though there is a
lot to be said for analysis of public data ... I believe that Facebook is making a big mistake by moving away from its origins based on privacy for user data."
Said Zuckerberg this
weekend: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people ... That social norm is just something that's
evolved over time."
Under the headline, "
Facebook Does Not Understand
the Meaning of Privacy," The Atlantic's Derek Thompson remarks, "I'm a faithful Facebook user and defender ... But it's a bit rich to hear CEO Mark Zuckerberg boast about his
company's psychic mastery of users' privacy wishes one month after Americans went apoplectic about Facebook's privacy updates." Adds Thompson: "Privacy is about control, and when
Facebook changes its privacy control rules every six months to keep pace with the zeitgeist (or whatever), its users lose both control and privacy."
The Guardian considers -- and then rejects -- the theory that people who share personal information online are
actually responsible for undermining everyone else's right to privacy, posited by Dr. Kieron O'Hara, senior research fellow at the department of electronics and computer science at the
University of Southampton.
"If you look at privacy in law, one important concept is a reasonable expectation of privacy, according to Dr O'Hara. "As more private
lives are exported online, reasonable expectations are diminishing. When our reasonable expectations diminish, as they have, by necessity our legal protection diminishes."
Arguing
that Facebook's recent changes are merely a sign of the times, Venture capitalist and blogger Howard Lindzon likens the social network's privacy policies to those of any financial institution,
today. "Equifax, Transunion, Capital One, American Express and their cousins raped our privacy and Facebook is a long overdue new competitor in a new age of what I would call 'User Controlled
Privacy'."
Meanwhile, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington -- who
actually conducted the interview with Mark Zuckerberg that sparked this most recent privacy debate -- calls anyone with reservations about the degree to which information is now public
"luddites." Either way, according to Arrington, "The fact is that privacy is already really, really dead."
Read the whole story at Read Write Web et al. »