Let’s say you have a friend who is a big blabbermouth and a friend who only discloses information about you if you give them explicit permission (FWODIAYIYGTEP). Knowing this, you regulate the information you tell the blabbermouth, but not the information you tell the FWODIAYIYGTEP. This is where Twitter and Facebook were three years ago. The heart of Twitter is and always has been broadcasting information publicly. This is why the Iranian revolution used Twitter and not Facebook. This is why cable news shows highlighted tweets rather than status updates. Facebook got jealous of the popularity and became a blabbermouth.
The ACLU is now very angry with Facebook. I am not. Facebook is merely attempting to become what Twitter has always been. The internet is built to broadcast information. Facebook is a networking site. I simply don’t understand how you can be mad at Facebook without being mad at Twitter, or WordPress, or HTML, or people who talk really loud on buses. Why does one website have to conform to a higher privacy standard than other websites?
It’s your job as a citizen of the internet to decide which sites are blabbermouths and which sites are FWODIAYIYGTEPs. The problem is that every site can potentially become a blabbermouth. They can even do it without meaning to by having a small hole in their code, which every site on the internet has. The logical conclusion here is if you don’t want it to be public, don’t put it on the internet.
But there’s another catch. Other people can put things about you on the internet, and they are becoming increasingly capable of doing so as humanity is getting better at recording and transferring information.
I’m here to warn you that in ten years you will be required to live in public. There will be no secrets. It won’t be because of a big brother government, or Facebook, or even malicious people. It will be because we like each other, and we want to know more about each other, and it’s very profitable to collect that information, make it public, and push it to anyone who wants it.
Stop having a temper tantrum over Facebook, and start gently tactfully taking the skeletons out of the closet. It’s only a matter of time until those walls will be brought down forcefully, and we’ll all learn an uncomfortably large amount about each other in a very short amount of time.
