How Many Twenty-three Year Olds Would You Trust Your Privacy To?

I’ll start by saying that I am not at all sure what Facebook and MySpace are. I know from occasional articles I’ve skimmed, that they are social networks; but, I’m also not sure what a social network is, other than “aggregating” (how’s that for a trendy word) Big Rick, Big Tony and a few other friends and labeling them as my social network. So is a social network a group of cyber-friends? And there’s another word, friend. It has become a verb. Do you ask someone to “friend” you on FB or MS? Both?

I guess I’m not going to catch the wave on this phenomena.

An interim story that I will connect a bit later: last week I went into a story to return something that I’d paid cash for a few hours earlier, it had a defective component. The cashier took the product and the receipt and punched a bunch of keys.

“Your telephone number please?”

“Why?”

“I have to enter it to authorize your refund,” she said as she swung the monitor towards me to “prove” the necessity by showing me the place where it would appear on the screen when I gave it to her.

“No you don’t.”

“I have to have it to ‘authenticate’ that you are entitled to a refund.”

“How does giving you my phone number establish that I’m entitled to a refund.”

I got a mildly disgusted look and a rolling of the eyes. I should add that it was slow at the store and another employee was standing there and what turned out to be a higher level employee was standing nearby.

Other employee, with a bit of sneer, said, “no phone number, no refund.”

“Want to bet?” I said in my “big boy” lawyer voice.

Higher level guy: “put the store phone number in,” which she did.

“Your name?”

“You have got to be kidding me, I won’t give you my phone number and you think I’m going to let you plug my name into the computer?”

Before she could roll her eyes, the higher level guy said “put my name in.” As she did it, I said “don’t take it personally, I just don’t give out personal information if it isn’t necessary.” I got my cash refund along with a look of utter distain.

As I left, I smiled at other employee and said “no refund?”

So, with this background in mind, it is unlikely that I would ever join/register/sign-up, or whatever you do at FB or MS.

But, were I to give Facebook my information, guess what? They have it forever under their Terms and Conditions. Even if you terminate your arrangement and “delete” your information, they keep it. A spokesperson explained that this was a “feature,” that allowed you to re-up and have all of your info there, just as you left it, albeit a feature that they didn’t tell you about.

Last Fall, Facebook started another “feature” called Beacon. It had forty some partners that reported Facebook’s members’ activity at their sites back to Facebook. Facebook then published the member’s activity to his/her “friends” and aggregated (there’s that cool word again) all of the info generated to create targeted advertising. “Dave just bought the entire catalogue of Vivid Video!” Dave would then presumably get targeted ads for other porn collections based on his personal preferences and angry Emails from his sister-in-laws complaining that their daughters, his nieces, were his Facebook “friends.”

The catch was that this sharing among Facebook and its business friends was an opt-out system that users weren’t told about and proved difficult to undo. It was only changed to an opt-in system after a lot of public criticism. And, given Facebook’s “feature” of keeping information even if it is deleted, Dave’s porno odyssey will remain on the servers forever.

The moral of the story is that whatever you tell people in person or on the web is out there for everyone to see, quite permanently in the case of cyber-sharing. When the rules for this information are being made by big companies that have no interest in your privacy concerns and are run by kids with a different mindset about what is and isn’t private, you might want to think several times before you give them access to you.

Oh, the title of the post: The founder of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg. He's 23. The two distainful employees at the store are about the same age.