The internet is quite nearly ablaze with discussion about the state of internet privacy, especially with regards to Facebook’s most recent changes. Some real luminaries are very publicly deleting their Facebook pages, and making a big deal about it. But what if you are the average joe, and you don’t necessarily think that your privacy values are worth ditching your friends on Facebook? There’s a competing service being launched, but asking the common internet user to spread his or her identity over multiple services is a hard sell. Implementing a good decentralized social network is challenging — it’s going to take more than 4 NYU students and some change.
I’m not surprised that a lot of the internet buzz has come down to the precise beliefs of Mark Zuckerberg regarding personal privacy. I’ve come to the conclusion that the “Zuck”, as he goes by, has no more dead-set beliefs than anybody else (except perhaps the staunch privacy advocates). Just about all of the commentators are right that Facebook has to stand up as a reputable company and respect the privacy of its users. But exactly what the general internet population does want is far more unclear.
If there is any resolution to this issue, I would say that Facebook should take the opportunity (while they are still at this height, that is) to buy out a more private network like LinkedIn. LinkedIn has a long way to come in making its interface friendly, but is respected as a reputable business site. Facebook could come in, allow some minimal aggregation of the two user profiles, and make the LinkedIn experience much better.
That would be a reasonable basis for a super-simple privacy model: if your friend gets to your url, give them the canonical Facebook page we are used to. If anybody else looks you up, give them a static page like LinkedIn (except prettier, maybe). No wall, no photos, no fuss.
The reality is that most of us have very complicated relations with the web. Most people — for purposes of pride if nothing else — want to be accessible and visible on the web. Just not exposed to the open world and all the riff-raff out there.
In summary, the denizens of the internet need two clearly separate interfaces (public and “private”) that share a common identity. Let’s face it — there’s no end of people making off-the-cuff remarks on Facebook. We even seem to enjoy posting pictures of ourselves doing stupid things from time to time. The big breakthrough of this month is that we have come to realize that services like Facebook need to respect their users by enforcing some protection from others, corporations, and possible employers as default.
As usual, the grand challenge here is an agreeable implementation — not internet privacy gospel. There’s really no universal standard for what is absolutely correct, and I’m not blown away that (up to now) Facebook has acted to preserve the fundamentals of its particular platform.
