What Happened to Privacy?

There’s no bigger question in the world of the social Web than what’s going on with privacy. Is it over? Can it be saved? Is it worth fighting for?

Facebook made headlines around the world a few months ago when it changed (weakened) its privacy protections and founder Mark Zuckerberg said the age of privacy is over and public is the new “social norm.” Bloggers such as Marshall Kirkpatrick quickly shared Zuckerberg’s arguments—including his statement that if he had to do it all again, Facebook would be fully public by default—and offered their take on the news.

In a post on Mashable, Pete Cashmore lamented that this move toward transparency was probably inevitable but still uncomfortable. He wrote: “So now Facebook is becoming a catalyst of social change, a transition that’s likely to be somewhat painful for all of us. Twitter dramatically lowered the barriers to content creation, and thus sharing our day-to-day lives became effortless. But it was Facebook that took the trend mainstream, affecting 300 million+ people worldwide.”

It’s worth pointing out that none of this seems to have stood in the way of Facebook’s popularity. The site went from 350 million users in January when these posts were written to more than 400 million today. Yet a number of those users are growing louder in their criticism. There’s a real backlash afoot, as evidenced in an angry open letter to Zuckerberg from early Facebook user Craig Kanalley on the Huffington Post. Among other things, he wrote, “And if the wrong piece of information gets to the wrong person, or if a private detail gets to a marketing company, or if criminals or stalkers find info they need to attack people, you will ruin people’s lives.”

It’s not just the rant of one disgruntled user. Information moves all too freely, and not only the things we post ourselves. Birthday greetings, family vacation photos and bits of gossip from our friends can reveal an awful lot of personal data. A New York Times article last month explained that researchers who analyzed 4,000 Facebook pages could predict with 78 percent accuracy whether the people behind those profiles were gay. Other researchers showed that they could use publicly available information from social-network profiles, along with other public sources, to deduce the Social Security numbers of almost 5 million people.

This issue hasn’t gone away, and privacy is continuing to be compromised in ways that are both accidental and intentional. Recently it was reported that a glitch made Facebook users’ private e-mail addresses public for about half an hour. And a few days before that, the Financial Times reported that Facebook had changed its privacy policy again, allowing the site to automatically share users’ personal information with third-party websites—and that privacy advocates were already up in arms.

These controversies put marketers in a tricky position. We love to be able to reach our target audience—especially the prosumers who are actively involved in the social Web—wherever they are, and we value specific demographic information. So on one hand, we appreciate Facebook’s moves to make more information available to us. But on the other hand, we’re users ourselves, and, well…

For now, we have more questions than answers. Can marketers respect users’ privacy while still taking advantage of all the ways Facebook lets you reach and target them? Where’s the line between privacy and access? Has it been crossed? Can we ever go back?

Stay tuned…