Over the past six years, social networking has been the Internet’s stand-out phenomenon, linking up more than one billion people eager to exchange videos, pictures or last-minute birthday wishes.
The sites, led by Facebook with more than 400 million users, rely in large part on people’s willingness to share personal information with an ever-expanding network of friends, either ones they actually know and see from time to time, or those they have met virtually through the Internet.
Members’ eagerness to add contacts has given the sites a powerful global reach, attracting users from 7 to 70 years old, from skateboarders to investment bankers, and with them a deep and potentially rich vein of targeted advertising revenue.
But at the same time it has concentrated vast amounts of data -- telephone numbers and addresses, people’s simple likes and dislikes -- on the servers of a small number of companies.
In Facebook’s case, the social networking tsunami has spread in barely six years from the Harvard dormroom of founder Mark Zuckerberg, 25, to envelope almost half a billion people -- enough to be the world’s third most populous country.
That in turn has raised profound privacy issues, with governments in Europe and North America and Asia concerned about the potential for data theft, for people’s identities to be mined for income or children to be exploited via the Internet.
Data protection authorities from a range of countries held a teleconference this week to discuss how they can work together to protect what they see as a steady erosion of privacy, and the European Union too is studying what role it can play.
They may not be able to hold the social networking wave back, but policymakers are looking at what they can do to limit what they see as the “Big Brother“-like role of some sites. A showdown between privacy and Internet freedom is looming.
“We cannot expect citizens to trust Europe if we are not serious in defending the right to privacy,” Viviane Reding, the European commissioner in charge of media and the information society, said in a speech in January, laying out her concerns.
“Facebook, MySpace or Twitter have become extremely popular, particularly among young people,” she told the European Parliament. “However, children are not always able to assess all risks associated with exposing personal data.”
People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are. — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
The privacy debate has been around as long as the Internet, but the explosive growth of social networking, and deepening concern about the impact it may be having on social interaction, has intensified discussion in recent months.
Incidents such as the Israeli soldier who announced details of an upcoming military raid via Facebook, and the murder conviction in Britain of a serial rapist who posed as a boy on the site, have fuelled the fears of both lawmakers and parents.
In 2009 and again this year, Canadian authorities challenged Facebook’s default privacy settings and its use of personal information for targeted advertising. Norway filed complaints after a year-long study of the site’s terms and conditions.
Facebook has added fuel to the debate, with the company deciding in December 2009 to substantially change its privacy settings, effectively making members’ profiles more openly accessible unless users altered the settings themselves.
Zuckerberg explained the move in January, saying social behaviour was shifting as a result of the Internet and that privacy was not the same now as it was even six years ago.
“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people,” he told an audience at a technology conference.
