What’s this “we,” Kemosabe?
Posted By Ing on January 12, 2010
I came across an article on TechCrunch about the furor over Facebook’s privacy changes, and the title drew me in: OK You Luddites, Time to Chill Out on Facebook Over Privacy.
And since I’ve been one of the many complaining about Facebook’s push toward publicizing everyone’s information to everyone, I figured I’d give it a read.
THE GIST OF THE ARTICLE
TechCrunch says our collective privacy is already long gone, and there’s no point in fussing about it now.
And they have a good point.
They say privacy was raped long ago by the credit card companies and their partners in crime, the credit reporting bureaus. The analogy seems apt. Like virginity, it seems that general privacy is something we can’t get back once lost.
And (sad as it is) TechCrunch pegged me when they said very few will stop using Facebook simply because it has less privacy than it once did; I’d like to ditch the place, but what with one thing and another it seems necessary to me (for now) to stay.
You really would have to be a Luddite — literally live in a cave somewhere — to avoid having everything you do, everything you buy, everywhere you go tracked and stored in a database somewhere for someone to use in some moneymaking enterprise or other.
Much as I’d like to strike back against the all-encompassing avarice of this world, I’m afraid I just don’t have it in me.
Besides, even living in a cave wouldn’t work. If you ever left it, you’d still be tracked by the system to the exact extent that you interacted with the rest of society (say, if you visited the local library every once in a while to blog about what it’s like living in a cave).
WHEREIN BLOG ING AND TECHCRUNCH PART WAYS
Their closing argument:
The point is, we don’t really care about privacy anymore. And Facebook is just giving us exactly what we want.
Uh…no.
I realize TechCrunch is basically an opinion outlet, and they’re overstating their “yeah, so what, join the new century” case for effect. In fact, I wish I could make myself believe their whole article is tongue-in-cheek…but somehow I can’t.
So pardon me (and read along) while my inner idealist and English major both go stark, staring, raving mad.
First…
Their closing argument is an impossible generalization.
I don’t know about all the other people in their vast collective “we” — reality TV and the trend of internet activity indicate that I’m probably in the minority — but I do care about my privacy. As in KEEPING it. What little of it I can, anyway.
Second…
“We don’t really care” is a non sequitur.
“Nobody cares, we secretly like it that way, and it just doesn’t matter,” does not necessarily follow from “privacy is dead.”
And finally…
There’s a red herring here, too.
Don’t be thrown off the scent: some people being okay with less (or zero) privacy has nothing to do with whether lack of choice in our privacy levels is okay. We may already have lost most of our privacy, but does that mean we all actually want to lose more of it?
You want to parade every datum in your life like some street-corner information whore hoping someone will take your profile for a ride? You can if you want, I guess. Me, I’d rather not.
If privacy ever did matter — if even the idea of it matters — then it still matters, even if it’s dead in practical terms.