Privacy and Facebook â The Non-Surprise
In 2008, I gave a talk at my 20th-year reunion at MIT Sloan. The title of the talk was something like âPrivacy is Deadâ and my assertion, in 2008, was that there was no longer any data privacy, anywhere, for anyone.
Iâve been living my life under that assumption since then.
The current Facebook scandal around Cambridge Analytica, and â more significantly â data privacy, shouldnât be a surprise to anyone. All of my experiences with companies around Facebook data over the years have been consistent with what is nicely called âdata leakageâ from Facebook out into the world. Facebookâs privacy and data settings have always been complex, have changed regularly over the years, and are most definitely not front and center in the Facebook user experience. And, that data has been easily and widely accessible at many moments in time to any developer who wanted access to it.
Answer the following questions:
Do you know what your Facebook privacy settings are?Are your Facebook privacy settings to your liking?Do you understand the implications of your Facebook privacy settings?Do you think your data has always been subject to these current settings?If the answer to all of these questions is yes, good on you. But, my answers are no to all of them and, unless you do some real work, you probably are answering no to at least two or three of them.
I havenât used Facebook for a while. I broadcast my blog posts to it, but Iâve never really figured out how to engage properly with it in a way that is satisfying to me. Periodically I think about deleting my Facebook account, but since Iâve been operating under the assumption that privacy is dead since 2008, it doesnât really bother me that my Facebook data is out in the world.
As I read articles about the current version of the Facebook Data Privacy Meltdown (or whatever name it is ultimately going to get this time around), Iâm fascinated by the amplification of ânothing new going on here, but now we are outraged.â A pair of articles that are a little off the beaten path (just watch CNN if you want the beaten path on this one) include:
The meme of #DeleteFacebook is making the rounds but itâs not new either. Hereâs one from 2012.
Iâm not sure what Iâm going to do, but I do know that Iâm not surprised.
Also published on Medium.