FaceBook Commits Suicide?

Founder Declares Privacy Is History

Facebook undergoes a radical shift in its views on how much privacy its hundreds of millions of users are entitled to. Sign them up with the impression that what they decide to share with friends and family through Facebook will be private forever, and then open the doors for some mega-datamining.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg :

"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'

"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. 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 has evolved over time.

"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

Marshall Fiztpatrick unloads :

Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutia of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos - if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples' lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that's old news, that people are changing.

Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable.

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Like I said, datamining. Consumption profiles on hundreds of millions of people must be worth billions to marketers and other manipulators of society.

Then again, Zuckerberg is party right. Most people don't seem to be concerned about their privacy, and willingly share the most intimate details of their lives, even once they understand that on the internet nothing is ultimately private.

In the 1980s, when the total surveillance society was a cultural cling-on from early 1970s paranoid fiction, and the fodder of short-wave conspiracy theory radio, the expected reaction from the masses at incredible violations of privacy would be disgust, outrage and uprising. But a surveillance society is no longer science fiction, or conspiracy theory. It's here, and yet most seem relatively unbothered by the thought of others knowing so much about them. Curiously, they seem more than willing to go into extreme detail of their likes and dislikes, and enthusiastically recall their personal moments, even to relative strangers online.

Anyway, here's the old Facebook privacy policy, that the vast majority of users never bothered to read :

"Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg. photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience. By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States."

Selling user data to intelligence agencies and marketing corporations appears to have been the intention from the start.

Which adds an interesting perspective to the Facebook CIA Conspiracy.