Yes there have been many bloggers already ranting about Mark Zuckerberg and his comments this week but I promise this is the most scathing and sardonic of them all.

Millions of e-mails and other personal information were recently hacked by “someone” in China. It could have been you. How would you have felt if it was? Do you like to feel that you can trust these large corporate institutions to respect and protect your individual right to privacy and confidentiality? The CEO of one of those entities, Mark Zuckerberg, apparently wouldn’t have minded at all.

Privacy is a thing of the past according to the young child who runs Facebook, and he’s become a troubadour of this new no-privacy era. Of course the more things you share about yourself on Facebook the more marketing data that can be collected on you. It seems a culture lacking privacy benefits our pubescent wunderkind and the social media platform he rules. What’s more frightening is that a recent interview with an anonymous Facebook employee in The Rumpus reveals that every click and post and profile you view is also recorded and tracked and Facebook employees are given a master code to gain access to any and all personal accounts.What they use this information for? Nobody knows…

Like a modern day Emile Durkheim, Zuckerberg claimed that privacy was no longer a societal norm.  I can see Zuckerberg waxing intellectual about the ethical and moral sea change that has gripped the modern world, a harem of sycophantic devotees breathlessly waiting on his every idea, peanut butter and jelly smacking behind his peach fuzzed lips between sentences. Now I can see Zuckerberg peeing with the door open at the Facebook office, clipping his nails next to the water cooler,  I can hear him talking really loudly about his visit to the doctor while mixing grape Kool Aid and putting up a drawing of his secret office crush right next to the photocopier. A guy who doesn’t care about privacy probably shares every detail of the company’s cash flow, financing and debts with every single employee and person he meets too. Because privacy is simply a thing of the past, it went out the window with jousting and pistol duels. And yet many people who finished their post secondary education seem to differ with this milky skinned juvenile.

Take Professor Ryan Calo for instance, a fellow the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University’s Law School. He suggests that:

“The picture is clearly more nuanced than Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments would suggest…I’ve seen several recent studies out of Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon, for instance, suggesting that people continue to value their privacy and are even willing to pay a premium for better privacy.”

Zuckerberg in his defense however did counter his critics by saying “A core part of Facebook’s mission has always been to deliver the tools that empower people with control over their information.” This of course coming from a company that operated in direct violation of Canadian privacy law.

Control over information doesn’t amount to privacy and protection of your information though, or maybe that’s what Zuckerberg meant to say. Maybe Facebook wants to deliver the tools that empower people with privacy and protection of their information, but that’s the thing with the internet. I have no idea who’s going to read this post when it goes live. I have to watch some of the things I say or write because I’m mindful of my reputation and the reputations of those connected to me. Perhaps it’s because I’m older (30) or  perhaps it’s because I’ve built up a network of friends, acquaintances and connections who I feel could be negatively affected by my actions and words if they were irresponsible and thoughtless ones? But when you’re 18 to 25 you don’t think like that. And so I think it’s dangerous that a company amassing such power over people’s identities and information should have a 25 year old college drop out at the helm.

Zuckerberg at the very least should realize the danger that comments like his pose. The president says he doesn’t like broccoli and suddenly a generation of girls grows up anemic. Zuckerberg says nobody cares about privacy anymore and a generation of high school kids grows up with a radically different notion of privacy. And I don’t care about what they themselves choose to post about their raging kegger or whatever else they feel is so important to share, it’s my privacy and yours that’s now compromised by “the new privacy” that Zuckerberg is helping to usher in. Think before you speak boy.  Would you like it if the Chinese hacked into your servers and poked around for a day? Or if the paparazzi harassed you for a week? Privacy is very serious and incredibly valuable.

It’s time Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg grew up and realized this.

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Related posts:

1. Deadline approaching for Facebook privacy changes, death is in the details
2. Facebook’s population tops U.S.
3. The Facebook Files: Social media in a socialist democracy

Tags: Canadian privacy law, Facebook, He suggests, his comments, interview with an anonymous Facebook employee, Mark Zuckerberg, Privacy is a thing of the past, The president says he doesn't like broccoli, The Rumpus

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 5:23 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.