The Zuckster And The Relativity Of Privacy

Facebook, again, is admitting to having “mistakenly” tracked its site users via poorly written cookies. The catch? Users weren’t even logged into their accounts.

Chalk it up to my Libertarian bent, but enough is enough. This marks the nth time in just the last eighteen months wherein Facebook has outright admitted to, has been suspected or has been accused of issues revolving around privacy. In the immediate term, the question is simple: Why haven’t you deleted your Facebook account yet?

Over on Mashable, Ben Parr recounts Zucker’s own admission in January 2010 that

[P]eople 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.

Others have speculated in more eloquent opulence about the ghostly surrealism not only of actual privacy in our current age, but also the expectation of holding it within one’s grasp.

Humor lies within the irony of Facebook’s social relevance though the seriousness of the larger social picture dampens the mood. The fact of the matter is that the Zuckster tells us of the exact ill which plagues our society in plain language: People really have gotten comfortable sharing…infomation. In relation to the Facebook site, there isn’t much more than a passing late-afternoon yawn in our collective reaction. In and of itself, this might not be so bad. After all, the minute one connects to the internet, expectations of privacy are yesterday’s reality. ISP’s track us. Individual websites track us. Our preferences are warehoused and manipulated through banner-ads and, such as on Hulu, ads tailored especially for each viewer.

The trend of sharing information automatically passes into information collection and yet it still comes as a shock to the general populace when a company is “caught” or admits to the collection. The greater, and more depressing, issue is that we expect differently of our government, especially that one found in Washington, D.C. If people are comfortable enough to share their lives online, and soon with the new Facebook redesign, everything since they’ve been born, what right do we have to complain about traffic cameras? The criminalization of recreational drugs? ObamaCare?

I’ve heard many times the old adage that a republic is lost when the people discover how to vote themselves money. The antithesis is then perhaps that a republic is found where citizens’ privacy is of their utmost concern. After all, what is privacy other than how an individual chooses to live, though the coupling of choice and privacy is a double edge sword. For an individual cannot lay claim to either if his choice leads to the necessity of bureaucracy.

Advertisement