Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Who Cares?

In the past few months Internet users have been bombarded with stories about government espionage and privacy loopholes on the most popular social networking sites and search engines. While we can be assured that our on-line banking purchases and credit cards are safe (unless you get phished), the information about what we buy, where we shop and who our friends are, is not. The recent Facebook privacy settings row has brought the issue of privacy front and centre once again. The question to ask here at Digital Tattoo, is do you care?

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Facebook is the call center of the Internet age. Advertisers no longer have to dial house to house, developing advanced methods to keep ahead of call-display technologies, they can profile broad generalizations about social groups, (age, sex, relationship status, travel map apps etc.), from social networking sites and beam back the same information via personalized advertising to the users who have unknowingly volunteered it. If unaware about how this cycle works, change your facebook status from ‘in a relationship’ to ‘single’ and see for yourself how your ads change. This type of privacy leak is only one of many uses of stored private information that industry watchdogs are weary of. They are also weary of users being unaware of what their privacy settings are due to default ‘everyone’ status, and that FB citizens are unknowingly sharing personal information while thinking they are protected.

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While here at DT we focus on getting the word out about on-line rights and digital identities, we have to also recognize the Internet is a place of profit and money must be made to keep it going. While FB founder Mark Zuckerberg might want to promote a so-called ‘social web,’ I have a sneaking suspicion that the back room reality is no doubt that advertizing revenue goes through the roof when personal information is disseminated.

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But do you care?

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Is it a reasonable exchange to trade broad personal information for access to the web and the social tools it provides to enrich our lives? By logging on to the web we have all answered ‘yes’ to this question whether we know it or not. Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg,  recently took advantage of this defacto human response by making FB privacy settings default to social rather than secure.

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As a cautious believer in the ‘open’ society, social default as it is called in the FB world, I must ask for a default setting myself, that choice remain paramount to any technology or institution bandying around concepts of an open and social world. Users should not have to ‘opt-out’ in order to save their personal info from getting broadcasted. Negative sales so-to-speak, like cable companies charging viewers for extra channels unless they decline their use, is a dubious marketing practice at best, and down right criminal at worst. While I am tempted to believe the benevolence of web pioneers like Zuckerberg, a line must be drawn when third parties without consent make personal decisions about individuals and have access to unceded information. A web based on openness and information freedom must also be a web based on consent for it to avoid contradiction. Consent is the basis of free society and it should be the same in web society. Implied consent, the notion that using the web equals consent, does not cut it when that ‘consent’ is used for unknown purposes of third parties. Moreover, a social web that does not allow use unless users agree to unnecessary terms is not a very social web. Visit the Protect section on the Digital Tattoo site to see how to adjust your FB privacy settings.