When I grew up, back in the Age of Analog, there were clear protections on our private communications. Along with setting up the U.S. mail system, our first postmaster general, Ben Franklin, had established laws of conduct making it clear that tampering with the post office was a serious crime. It was unlikely that anyone was listening to you on the phone without a warrant signed by a judge.
When I was a teen, the adults in my life fought hard to prevent the government or anyone else from having access to public library records. What books you took out were your own business, and since a detailed history of your reading preferences clearly reflected something private and personal about your identity, no one but you and your librarian had a right to see it.
Had the activists of my youth been offered a glimpse of the future and heard about Facebook—our latest, most popular form of communication—I feel certain most of them would have flatly rejected the notion that they’d ever willingly cooperate with a private company that wanted to compile a detailed dossier of their habits and preferences so they could sell the information to other private companies.
Yet one in 14 people globally have signed up to let the company that 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg built monitor and record what they do, and profit from the information. A recent New Yorker article profiles the entrepreneur and master programmer. In “The Face of Facebook,” author Jose Antonio Vargas speculates that should the company incorporate and sell shares, Zuckerberg stands to be the nation’s youngest billionaire. The story also states that Zuckerberg is remorseful about instant messages that have recently come to light, written by him in the “early days” of Facebook (five years ago):
ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard just ask[.] i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that…?
ZUCK: people just submitted it[.] i don’t know why they “trust me” dumb fucks
Zuckerberg “absolutely” regrets writing those and other similar messages that have come to light recently, the article says. “If you’re going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right?” Zuckerberg told Vargas. “I think I’ve grown and learned a lot.”
Maybe so, but such assurances are hardly ironclad protections. Zuckerberg is no Ben Franklin. Only a few months ago, without notice, Facebook changed its privacy policy so that suddenly every user’s personal preferences and friends lists, once hidden, were now available to anyone who wanted them. Only by deliberately adjusting your settings could you hide that information from public view. The company has since said it will be more explicit when changes are made in the future. But it’s not required to. It’s a privately owned company and there are few regulations governing how social networking sites can be run or what can be done with the information they harvest.
Facebook is becoming more invasive. In past weeks, I’ve seen its icons appear near the New York Times’ online masthead, as well as on a crummy computer game I downloaded for a dollar. At a recent community meeting I attended, members discussed ways to leverage “free” technology to facilitate communication. Someone recommended a Facebook page.
From the macro to the micro, Zuckerberg’s company is learning his members’ business and selling the information to interested parties. His goal, he says, is to make the world a more open, transparent place. It may sound as if he wants to expand our personal freedom and sense of community, but it’s selling those things that will make him a billionaire.
