Want privacy? Skip Facebook
I’m not a particularly private person. Over the weekend, I was talking with friends about their different approaches to Facebook. I’m a competitive Facebooker – I’m all about racking up the numbers. Many of my friends are far more discreet, only confirming people they know well. And once that’s done, they also sort them into groups, giving different people different levels of access to their information.
Today, for the first time, one of my dear friends posted a picture of me from my 30th birthday, which was a costume party (and ten years ago). It’s not super compromising, but neither is it appropriate for work, and many of my professional peers are on my Facebook. In any case, I deleted it off my profile and he has since taken it down so don’t even try to go searching for it.
That said, many, many other people are much more concerned about their privacy than I am and they spent the weekend making that clear. (Don’t people have better things to do over a long President’s Day weekend than complain about Facebook privacy policies? I myself was in Austin, attending a birthday gathering of old friends, eating Tex-Mex and watching others run a marathon. See, there are all those things one could do. Shut the laptop lid and go outside, people!)
Two weeks ago, Facebook posted new terms, saying that even if someone deleted their profile, Facebook would keep all of their information – emails, pictures, videos, what have you. Here’s the sentence that sent privacy advocates and some Facebookers into a frenzy: “If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”
On Monday, Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg blogged to clarify that position, saying: “When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.”
The truth is – and any IT guy will tell you this – when you send anything digitally, a copy gets made as it goes through servers. That’s why it’s not such a good idea to write anything in email that you wouldn’t want to see printed in the papers. Almost anything can be retrieved if someone really wants it. As the Silicon Alley Insider’s Nicholas Carlson put it: “Our take is: duh. Users should assume that as soon as they upload content to the Web, it’s out of their control like a scarf lost to the wind.”
While Facebook works to sort out this snafu, the service will revert to its old terms. It will then create new terms written in language that everyone can understand.
It’s great that Facebook is working to make its policies more palatable to its 175 million members (which would make it the sixth-largest country in the world! according to Zuckerberg), the truth is that if you really are that concerned about your privacy, Facebook may not be for you. Facebook is designed not to protect your privacy, but to share your day-to-day life with the people you select. It’s a conflict of interest for sure – remaining private while sharing your life with friends. But it’s the choice you make when you sign up. In the end, your best privacy advocate is you.
