Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg was dinged in her brief bid for the US Senate in 2008 for repeating the words “you know” in interviews with media outlets. You’d be surprised how often so many of us have tics like that, myself included. “You know” are two words that I use as sort of a mental comma to let my mouth catch up to my brain. It’s a nervous habit and tends to make you sound like an idiot if you don’t pay attention to it. The helpful folks over at the New York Daily News tallied Kennedy’s “you knows” and counted over 400 in interviews she did over a period of a few days. Her senate bid flamed out just a few weeks later.

Caroline Kennedy probably hasn’t done tons of media training because as someone who has lived her life in or near the media klieg lights, she has always valued her privacy. In fact she co-wrote a prescient, insightful book in 1995 about the topic with Ellen Alderman, “The Right to Privacy,” that is more relevant today than ever.

In the book, Kennedy and Alderman pointed out that the word “privacy” doesn’t appear in the Constitution and that no explicit right to privacy exists; and then go on to cite numerous examples of infringements of privacy – by legal means. They also warned of new threats to personal privacy that they correctly predicted would explode during the digital age.

“…[W]hat is far and away the biggest threat to privacy today, the one individuals are most powerless against … [is] the increased technical ability to gather and disseminate all kinds of personal information about each and every one of us. Both government and the private sector are exponentially increasing their ability to track, monitor, and profile us.”

Facebook is an example of a corporate entity that now seems to be threatening the privacy of individuals in this way. Once just a goofy network for college students to hook up and share pix with their friends, Facebook has morphed into an information octopus with a black box that is collecting and archiving data on hundreds of millions of people on a minute-by-minute basis. Judging from the digital Zeitgeist these days, the good will that has Facebook built over time as an innocent means to stay in touch with friends and family may be giving way to a general sense of suspicion and distrust.

Writing for Wired, Ryan Singel has go so far as to say that Facebook has gone “rogue” and is calling for an “open alternative:”

[I]n December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, [Facebook] reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.

This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.

This includes your music preferences, employment information, reading preferences, schools, etc. All the things that make up your profile … Simultaneously, the company began shipping your profile information off pre-emptively to Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft — so that if you show up there while already logged into Facebook, the sites can “personalize” your experience when you show up. You can try to opt out after the fact, but you’ll need a master’s in Facebook bureaucracy to stop it permanently.

Read More at http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue.

I’m increasingly wary of Facebook and what it’s doing with my personal information — and am beginning to think that Facebook has jumped the shark — or at least lost its reputation as a harmless pastime. I’d be willing to pay for a similar service that promised to protect my privacy, or better yet, use a free, open source alternative. What about you? Are you still cool with being nude in public? Or is it time to get dressed?

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Marketing, privacy, Social Media, Social Networks

Share/Save