What Makes Facebook Scary

Is your privacy important to you?

A generation ago this question was answered with an unmistakable "Yes." Individual rights and freedoms were built on the basic idea that everyone is entitled to some degree of privacy.

Looking at my own generation, the same question seems to be "privacy is important - but it depends on how much free stuff I can get."

The rise of the Internet has seen the issue of privacy spring up again and again, namely due to the inherent risk of sending any kind of personal data over a public wire. Social networking via the Internet in the last five years has see a wider breadth of privacy issues crop up. No longer is just your banking information or social security number up for grabs, but your basic identity as a person. My bank account gives a person access to money. My Facebook page give a person access to my name, my likeness, my birthday, information about my friends and family, where I live, and what are my interests. This is information more valuable to me than money, yet I have it sitting on a massive server where millions of people can access it via my profile page.

Why throw all this information out there? It was neat at first. Facebook presented a wall-garden approach to its site when it launched in 2004: college-only access to a private network where I could interact with my peers. I loved the idea of having a private space on the web accessible only to like-minded people. Then came high schools in 2005. Then came a wider audience in 2006, when Facebook opened up to anyone in the world. I was not happy about this move, but I was able to keep my privacy settings fairly strict; only my friends could see my full profile.

Fast-forward to 2010. The sense of belonging to a tight-knit group of peers at or around BGSU is long gone - my friends come from all directions now. I get requests for friends who are obviously spammers in disguise. I have notifications every day from applications that I could care less about. My News Feed is filled with information on "friends" I have not talked to since high school and advertisements for things I would never buy.

Facebook is no longer my space. It is Facebook's space, and I knew it would come to this one day.

The big roll out for Facebook in 2010 is to add Internet-wide functionality to the site, allowing any website to integrate data into the Facebook News Feed. I would imagine that this will involve the use of Facebook Connect, a platform that allows third-party websites to use your Facebook credentials for authentication purposes. Also, in order to open the platform a bit more, Facebook is requiring users to expose certain parts of their profile to the full Internet and linking certain kinds of interests to public groups rather than just listing plain-text in profiles. The wall-garden crumbles a little bit more.

I am an active user of Facebook . However, I am not a happy Facebook user. The direction that Facebook has been going in the past four years has not always been in my interests, but this latest opening of information has forced me to strip my profile bare: it contains less than a quarter of the information it did in 2007.

Facebook is a company, and companies are about making money. So why does Facebook keep making changes that open users' data to the world? Because Internet advertisements are their business. Just like Google became rich and powerful by tying Internet ads to highly-accurate and refined search results, Facebook is positioning itself to serve ads to its users that are highly-accurate and refined - based on the very information that you share about yourself. This has always been the recipe for Facebook's success, but I only went along with it during the wall-garden days. Too much of my personal information is now required to be public on the site.

Finally, what makes Facebook scary?

Facebook may teach a whole generation that privacy is not important. I find this scary. In a world where monetary value is so important, why would trading something seemingly free (privacy) in order to get something for free (games, websites, videos, music, social networking, etc.) sound like a good idea? Facebook (along websites such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's Bing) provides extensive free services that today's generation will come to expect from future websites and services. By providing private details about oneself, websites can afford to do this since your personal information is valuable to advertisers. The circle is complete.

If my generation and future generations grow up in a world where privacy is so easily traded, what will our future look like? Perhaps it will be heavily materialistic and affordable, yet we will know everyone's business. Perhaps future citizens will be more apt to let the government pry into their private lives in the name of national security. This is a far cry from Nineteen-Eighty-Four - I am not trying to get political or philosophical on this topic - but the seeds towards a less-private future may just have been planted by the huge success that is Facebook.

To me, it is just a little too scary.

For a graphical representation of Facebook's default privacy changes in the past five years, visit this link:

http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/

B3 out.