Your Privacy, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,
Anyone over 30 will tell you that their lives are private. Even celebrities that live in the spotlight seek personal and private time for themselves.

Why? Because, as the social creatures that we humans are, we like also to be in control.

And our basic type of control is in what we share about ourselves, because, we believe, that what we deem to be personal and private ought to stay that way.

Now comes along a guy in charge of a very large company, with millions of members that “share” their private stuff with friends by using this guy’s online social website.

Certainly we use this site (and many other sites like it as well) to exchange messages, as well as daily events, with our friends there. We do so under the guise that no matter what, if we want certain aspects of our lives to remain private then we want to have control over the information that is made available about ourselves. Now and at any time in the future, as we see fit.

We shouldn’t have to ask, beg or plead for this type of control, it should be offered freely and respectfully to us.

But you, Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook.com, a social website with more than 350 million members, doesn’t see the privacy and the personal control issue this way.

Watch the video:

The norm for posting things on the web has been, and likely will always be, that as soon as you publish it, it’s there forever.

However, this is contrary to the privacy laws of many countries and as a private company Facebook.com walks a very fine line with their privacy policy and the access/denial and post/unpublish controls that members have over what they themselves post as public/private content.

Mark Zuckerberg would have us believe that their are more people that feel that there should be no privacy controls whatsoever for online social services (as if that was the beginning and the end of the privacy issue concerning a private person publishing content to their “own” pages) and that everything should be public. Period.

Mr. Zuckerberg, I ask you to maintain, if not improve, the controls that members have to protect the personal information that they post on your social business website and turn yourself around from believing that many people want the world to operate in a different way.

Certainly there are millions of people (generally under the age of 30) that do not quite grasp the reality of what privacy really means. They do not understand how the Internet will follow them for the rest of their lives. They have yet to see the challenges of information being used against them, like some totalatarism machine that is about to be awoken.

Yes, everyone is Googling everyone else. We search Facebook.com as well as many other online social services to get the “honest story” of someone’s life, maybe someone we have just met, maybe an employment candidate.

People should be in charge of what they publish as much as possible, not as little as possible. And that should extend into the future just as copyright protects books from being unfairly republished and/or the rights of the author stripped away before legally permissable.

Mr. Zuckerberg, reverse your stand, rethink your position.

Or within 5 years we will see the implosion of Facebook.com because of the now very real personal information danger spot it will become.

Regards,
Robert Lee