Privacy? What a quaint idea. Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy said a decade ago that we have no privacy any more, and that we had better start getting used to it.
That may be overstating the case a little, but the uncomfortable reality of our online world – one that Web users in general, and federal privacy officials in particular, continue to struggle with – is that privacy is a much more fluid notion than it used to be, thanks to the proliferation of “social networking” tools and services such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.
In the pre-Web era, your privacy was something that was largely under your control, and apart from having your picture appear in the newspaper or on a police blotter somewhere, the risks were fairly limited, and easily understood. Now, the definition of privacy is a lot harder to nail down – and, in fact, differs from person to person – and the risks are (theoretically at least) unlimited.
The inherent contradiction at the heart of a social network like Facebook is that in order to get anything out of it, you have to provide all kinds of personal information about yourself. The more you provide, however, the more you chip away at your personal privacy.
How much you have succumbed to the wiles of Facebook and its ilk will ultimately determine whether you see this as a worthwhile trade-off or a Faustian bargain with no end of downside.
Thanks to Facebook's access controls (which it recently enhanced), privacy is no longer a binary choice – that is, either on or off – but more of a spectrum, which of course makes it infinitely more complicated. Do you want your photos to be seen by everyone, or just certain close friends and family members? Do you want your detailed profile to be seen by all your Facebook friends, or only some of your “real” friends? Choose wisely.
Do these controls remove all the risks? No. There could still be incriminating photos of you floating around that someone else uploaded, or a friend of a friend may be using your information in ways that you know nothing about, or some ne'er-do-well could be madly typing variations of your family name and date of birth into a Web form at your bank, trying to guess your user name and password.
Ultimately, nothing – not even the federal Privacy Commissioner – can completely protect you from those risks, short of trying to remove all trace of yourself from the Internet, which is almost impossible.
The fact is that being online in almost any way – and that includes appearing in a simple Google search, let alone being on Facebook – involves a loss of privacy and a potential risk. By joining social-networking services and giving up your personal data, you are effectively striking a bargain, whether you realize it or not. In return for providing that data, you get access to free services such as e-mail, photo-sharing tools (and the ability to be contacted by that guy from junior high whose name you could never remember).
The issue then becomes whether sites like Facebook are doing a good enough job of describing what they are going to do with your information, and limiting the risks involved. Those are the hairs that Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart is trying to split on your behalf. But the bargain itself isn't going to change.
