Privacy Problems Part 1

Privacy is a sticky subject when it comes to social media. Ever since the ordinary internet user began to be able to connect themselves to a potential audience of thousands, the problem of privacy has become a leading debate around new media.

There is a blurry line between public and private on the World Wide Web – especially when it comes to social networks. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube make it easy for Joe from down the road to consider himself very famous thanks to his hundreds of followers.

The term ‘followers’ itself seems to signify a kind of digital, socially acceptable stalker. Facebook and YouTube use the term ‘friends’ but Google unabashedly refers to followers. And why not? That’s what they do – they follow your digital persona. As you do their’s.

Our social networking personae have become linked to our identities and sense of self worth – we value ourselves and our social worth based on the number of Facebook friends we have. But this has all sorts of ramifications, especially since we’re talking to our friends in a public sphere where it isn’t weird for someone to eavesdrop.

As Rian Van Der Merwe, a Memeburn blogger and experienced developer pointed out, “if you decide to write on someone’s wall and not send an email or a text, you are doing it so that other people can see it. And that hurts the authenticity of the interaction.”

This is as much a valid point as the identity-construction arguments that have come out of debates around emerging social networks. We pull in various parts of our identities to mould into the shape we want others to see. So that our online personae can end up being something far removed from our ‘real’, analog selves.

So, what has this to do with our privacy?

Well, if there’s a you on the internet that is constructed by you in order to meet certain ends, whatever those may be, privacy isn’t really an issue, is it? Is this too simplistic a position?

I think that we need to think of the internet as what it really is – a kind of marketplace. If the internet weren't monetised, it would hardly have been such a booming success. Twitter signed a $15 million deal with Google at the end of 2009 and will soon start profiting from sponsored Tweets and TechCrunch reported that Facebook earns over a billion dollars a year.

The fact is, developers wouldn’t be nearly as keen to spend time and resources building web-tools if they couldn’t make some money from them. And the easiest way to make money is by making sure people click on ads. And the best placement for ads is sites with high traffic. And the best way to get high volumes of traffic is by capitalising on people’s vanity.

If we keep this in mind while we pull the strings of the puppet we allow to shout across the crowded rooms of our social networks, then surely we will come to understand how privacy on the internet works?

PS: Thanks to lumaxart for the awesome graphic. Follow lumaxart’s Flickr Photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lumaxart/