Jersey Shore In Cyberland, or, Privacy And Its Discontents

A few years ago, over a few too many glasses of sangria at the local tapas lounge, a bloggery friend of mine opined that there’s something generational about the current approach to privacy. They’ve taken Andy Warhol to the logical endpoint, she said, and it doesn’t matter anymore what you’re famous for, as long as you’re famous. Thus we wind up with a bunch of orange mooks with too much hair product as America’s biggest entertainers of 2009-10.

This also sprang to mind as I considered Facebook’s continuing sodomy of user privacy. Today they announced that sites using Facebook Connect data – that use of the Facebook ID as a login for other sites – will now be allowed to retain that data indefinitely, rather than deleting it after 24 hours. Which basically means that any site that touches your Facebook identity now has the right, in perpetuity, to all the data of every other site or resource you access via your Facebook identity.

Basically, Facebook’s arrogating itself the right to sell your whole presence online.

The whole appeal of Facebook was based on three things: it was exclusive, it was granular, and it was authentic. You were pretty much entering a gated community, and though you had to trade under your own name, you had control over who saw what and when. It was pretty much the key to putting everything online, knowing that you would control who got what.

Well, the gates flung open in 2006 – first some carefully selected corporations became the first non-edu addresses from which you could sign up (disclosure: I was at one of them, and did, largely out of the need to sign up for everything but also to keep track of our recalcitrant campus sales reps). Then before long the floodgates were thrown open and anybody could join. Big problem, which made the ability to have granular control all the more important.

And then, over the last twelve months, Facebook has used its seemingly endless redesigns to slowly cut away at what you can or can’t hide. Your friends list. The groups you belong to. Your interests. Your location. Things you probably filled in without considering that Facebook might unilaterally decide that all that information would be made public.

But they did. And with today’s announcements at f8, Facebook has nailed their colors to the mast: they stand for maximizing the amount of connections and mineable data, and user privacy be damned. So the first two essentials have been tossed, and that makes the third worse by far: all of this is traceable to your actual honest-to-God identity.

I don’t know if this is all down to the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is of the generation that has made an idol of celebrity, or if maybe he’s just too young and too geek to think about the bigger picture. Or maybe it’s because Facebook’s growth has continued despite all these shenanigans. Or perhaps it’s just the bottom-line realization that getting money means coming up with an ever-greater crop of data to harvest (an apt metaphor in the land of Farmville). But mark my words: the next big thing will be a way of social networking that returns granularity and privacy to the system.

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