The Real Meaning of Privacy in a Public, Digital World
The privacy issues in social media have always been a public matter, but the latest complaint adds more fuel to the fire. In November 2010, two British newspapers quoted tweets of a government worker that previously posted on Twitter the fact that she supported the opponent party and that she was hungover during work hours.
The complainer, Sarah Baskerville, filed two separate complaints with the Press Complaints Commission, citing breach of privacy and inaccuracy. Baskerville stated she expected the tweets to be shared to her followers only and not to the entire social media community. The Press Complaints Commission replied by saying that ‘republication of material by national newspapers, even though it was originally intended for a smaller audience, did not constitute a privacy intrusion’.
In October 2009, Twitter announced it would team up with Google to make users’ tweets available on Google.com, under the name of real-time content. Google is accounted as a ‘personal data grabber’ with features like Google Checkout, Google Docs and Google Earth.
Although feelings of discontent and fear are rising, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt does not take much care in ensuring privacy measures: ‘If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines – including Google – do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities’. Google, at the very least, has launched KMOO (Keep My Opt Outs), an online privacy-focused Chrome extension.
Facebook is no stranger either to similar data security issues, the last year having to deal with a worm downloaded around 28,000 times and the with the Facebook apps 3rd party data leakage. On the other hand one cannot have web and privacy of data at the same time, as even Facebook would cease to exist. Plus, as Mark notes, privacy is a versatile term that can be defined in various ways. But money makes the world go round, and as long as private stored data brings revenues, privacy and ethics can be put aside.
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