Lately, online privacy has been widely discussed, especially with regard to Google and Facebook.
All your information are belong to us
Between these two, Facebook has the more condemnable approach to user privacy. Facebook’s complex and ever-changing privacy policy is suspect, as is its practice of rolling out privacy changes to all its users regardless of preset user preferences. If you set your profile picture to be accessible to only friends, Facebook has violated your privacy, because now your profile picture is searchable on Google. Facebook’s conduct can likely be defended in a strict legal sense by a close reading of the company’s privacy policy, but this conduct is clearly at odds with a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Of course, defining what constitutes a reasonable expectation of privacy is difficult for online information. Furthermore, it is worth distinguishing between privacy and confidentiality. Facebook should protect users’ privacy, but users must also recognize that nothing posted online is confidential.
Will Google's new Shower View project raise greater privacy fears than Street View?
For example, e-mail is generally private and secure, but clearly an e-mail sent to a friend and one sent to an employee covered by a non-disclosure agreement are different — one is private, while the other is confidential. Even if your Facebook data can be viewed only by friends, none of your friends have signed an NDA. Although Facebook’s privacy policy is flawed, many of its most vocal critics neglect the inherently public nature of a social networking site.
Today, I read an article about Google’s WiFi snooping. One German official was “horrified” by the incident, and Google has apologized and promised to delete the data. But, in this case, I am hard pressed to find anything wrong with Google’s conduct. Does Street View violate privacy? Perhaps privacy standards in German differ from those in the United States, but the outer facade of a home, as viewed from a public road, is public by its very nature; and the address of a home is publicly available. As for payload data collected from non-password-protected WiFi connections, maybe I am a technological snob, but such data are no more worthy of an expectation of privacy than words shouted on your front lawn or flyers posted on a telephone pole.
This blog is an example of my approach to privacy. Because the Internet is public, I don’t post anything here that I wouldn’t want my grandmother or boss to read. Nevertheless, I do hope to maintain a certain degree of privacy (basically, I don’t want this site to come up as the first result on Google if a future potential employer queries my name). So, I have purged the site of certain identifiable information such as my full name. Also, I have installed a robot.txt file keep parts of the site off of search engines. Sure, someone could find this site by connecting the dots from my more personally identifiable Facebook or Twitter account, and the information here is hardly secret or well-protected, but I am able to exercise a degree of control over where this information is publicized (e.g., on my Twitter feed but not in search result for my name). Facebook should give users similar control, while users should exercise caution regarding shared information.
None of this is to say that I think privacy is unimportant or that Google’s actions are not somewhat creepy. Instead, users, Internet companies, and government officials should more carefully consider online privacy to better suit the realities of the Internet.
sneaky
