Continuing to be outraged over Facebook changing its users’ privacy settings is like wearing sunglasses at night: annoying and ridiculous. If there’s one thing Mark Zuckerberg has made perfectly clear time and time again it’s that he believes privacy is no longer the “social norm.” By creating and keeping up profiles on the most popular social network in the world, we have entered into a silent agreement with Facebook that our social lives are now to be put on display.
We’ve been publishing who we’re friends with, where we go to school, what we’re studying, what movies we like, what music we listen to, what we believe in, who inspires us and, of course, our photos. Zuckerberg merely created a platform that enabled us to post every detail of our lives on the Internet, and over the last seven years we’ve been incessantly updating our statuses.
Yet Facebook infuriated some again recently by announcing on its Developer Blog that it will now allow third-party apps, like FarmVille and Formspring, to obtain personal contact information from users’ profiles. This means the next time you play one of those silly games or take a quiz to find out which “Twilight” character you’re supposed to be with, the application will request your permission to access your address and cell phone number.
In an interview with the Guardian, a British Daily newspaper, a Facebook spokesperson said that the point of this new policy is to “make applications built on Facebook more useful and efficient.” Vague? If you’re truly concerned about anonymous programmers having access to your private information, then the best thing you can do is take a fresh look at what information you’ve provided and delete anything excessive. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to stop playing those absurd games.
But it makes no sense to continue complaining about Facebook’s apparent lack of concern over our privacy qualms. First of all, Zuckerberg and Facebook have made more considerable adjustments to the site’s privacy settings before, and the controversies that surrounded those changes didn’t have much of an effect on the site’s membership. But what’s more important, is when it comes to protecting the thoughts, tastes and connections that make us us, we’re our own worst enemies.
We’re the ones choosing to share our lives on a web site that is developed and managed by a 26-year-old who, in an interview with Wired magazine, said, “The thing I really care about is the mission, making the world open.”
It doesn’t get much clearer than that. I believe that it’s Zuckerberg’s intent to use Facebook to revolutionize targeted advertising.
The advertising business has suffered greatly during our country’s economic slowdown, and more and more companies are looking for better ways to pinpoint their ideal consumers and appeal to their needs and wants more effectively. There’s less money to go around. Therefore, the sellers of products like coffee, clothes, shoes and textbooks need to be more clever when determining how to spend it. That’s where Facebook comes in.
In a matter of minutes and clicks, you can go from being a bored, procrastinating college student to a target customer. Want to know what Converse Chuck Taylor shoe you are? Converse wants to let you know with a marketing postcard in the mail. “Like” Starbucks Caramel Frappuccino? Starbucks likes to send you a coupon. Need to vote on who’s the best quarterback in the NFL? NFL Shop needs to send you a text letting you know that they have a jersey just for you.
Maybe the prophecies of Orwell’s “1984” are slowly beginning to take place all around us. Or maybe the bankers at Goldman Sachs with the their recent $450 million investment in Facebook are sitting around in a dark boardroom plotting their next big financial takeover. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg is a misunderstood genius who just wants to know if we like Gap hoodies and Adidas flip flops as mush as he does. Or maybe, just maybe, we have to own up to the fact that we have committed the ultimate social faux pas: TMI.