On the last day of SXSW Interactive, I attended a showing of a remarkable documentary, We Live in Public. It won an award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and there’s lots about it online. Accordingly, I’ll just say it chronicles the strange, sad life of Josh Harris, a tycoon of the dot-com bubble who, however, considers himself mainly an artist. Television was a profoundly formative influence on him (I half expected to hear David Byrne singing “Television made me what I am…” in the background at some point), and around the turn of the millenium, he did “experiments” where people, including himself, spent weeks or months under all-encompassing video and audio surveillance. The results weren’t pretty, as people and relationships broke down in the complete absence of privacy.
Harris thinks of himself as a prophet, showing us what the Internet will ultimately do to all of us, namely, annihilate our privacy. Other people interviewed in the film express the same belief, as does the filmmaker herself. In particular, the film suggests Facebook and other social networking sites are part of this trend and implies our embrace of them will, like Harris’s experiments, end badly. So are Facebook, MySpace, and, um, iFavr paving the way to a privacy-less dystopia?
I doubt it. I think there are a couple of important points Harris and the film neglect. One is that most people find the notion that everything they say or do should be public preposterous. There have always been exhibitionists, but they have always been a minority. I suspect the reasons go deeper than culture, because although standards of privacy vary across cultures, I’m not aware of any culture in which privacy is considered worthless. Be that as it may, so-called lifecasting services (e.g., Justin.tv) have been around for years now, but their popularity is negligible compared to Facebook, MySpace, or even Twitter. Moreover, most people who use them do so much less pervasively than Harris used his cameras and microphones, as manifest in the fact that people who do use them very pervasively are still scarce enough to be minor celebrities, a decade after Harris.
The other point is that most people think it’s theirs to decide which things they say or do should be public. Among the technorati, it’s commonplace to dismiss this idea as quaint, bordering on delusional, as regards things like Facebook, which knows so much about us. But Facebook isn’t free to do whatever it wants with what it knows. There’s a clip, shown twice in the film, in which Harris says, about one of his experiments, “Everything is free, except the video that we capture of you - that, we own.” What would happen if Facebook said something like that? Well, last month, it did - and the result was an eruption of protest so explosive that Facebook backtracked and instituted a new system for revising its terms of service. (Mark Zuckerberg says, more or less, it was all a misunderstanding, and I think he makes some valid points.) It may well be most people don’t fully understand what companies are doing with their information, but that doesn’t mean just anything goes. Most people do have boundaries, and companies that transgress them or imply people aren’t entitled to them are living dangerously. (Governments are another, more problematic matter.)
So, although many people certainly are less private about some things than they used to be, and although it certainly is prudent to be vigilant toward companies we give information, I think there’s enough vigilance and intuitive self-defensiveness out there that mass adoption of Facebook and the like probably won’t lead to a privacy apocalypse. I suspect the dangers of social media are less to society than to individuals like Josh Harris, who seems unusually lonely and apt to do self-destructive things for the sake of attracting attention.
iFavr isn’t for exhibitionists. Although what you say in your favrites is public in that anybody on Facebook (and maybe eventually other social networking sites) can see it, it’s still private in that nobody can see your name attached to it unless you’ve authorized them to see your Facebook profile (unless you deliberately include your name in a favrite). We think this has two benefits. First, it’s simple. Facebook’s own privacy controls have become rather complex, and we didn’t want to stack another complex scheme on top of them. Second, it respects your privacy and at the same time enables your expressions of enthusiasm for things you like to attract even people you don’t know to them. We find this a happy medium between being completely public and completely private. But we want to know what you think. Let us know, by commenting here or visiting the iFavr feedback page, if you like privacy in iFavr the way it is or if you’d like it better some other way. We can’t promise to do what you want, but we do promise to listen and weigh what you and other iFavr users say as we decide what to do.
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