Standards of Privacy and the Communities Setting Them

Considering the continuing debate over evolving privacy standards that has come to prominence with the move of social networking websites towards the mainstream, and in particular Facebook’s receding standard of privacy documented by the Electronic Frontier foundation in a handy timeline. Going back to 2005 and seeing

No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

seems like an anachronism given Facebook’s current business model that encourages sharing with Third-Party applications and sites. While Facebook’s future redefinitions of privacy may only be speculated by those outside of the company, the framework for the site’s ongoing reconstructions of privacy’s meaning comes through in the 2006 privacy policy.

We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.

The idea of reasonable community limitations is the key to understanding this shift, as is Facebook’s assertion that they will tell you what community limitations are. communities have always been the determining factor behind standards of privacy much as they are of obscenity. In much the same way that the standards for language in a kindergarten are more stringent from those in a bar, expectations of privacy vary between the relative anonymity a large city allows compared to the environment present in a college dormitory.

Google hasn’t been a force strengthening a strong concept of privacy online either, especially in light of the way that Buzz was rolled out or considering Eric Schmidt’s comments on the matter. In a piece highlighting aspects of life on the Google campus, Valleywag offers some of the more disturbing bits from a Googler’s blog. But are they intrinsically disturbing? My life and the community standards that I have picked up lead me to be put off by some aspects of the Google lifestyle, but I could probably adapt to them. Most people could. The question is should we? To what extent should we be adapting our standards of privacy? These aren’t empty questions as the people working to decide prevailing standards or privacy are in large part going to be working in environments like Google’s new implementation of the company town.

Links: [EFF Facebook Timeline] [Googleplex Life]

As an additional note for those wishing to opt out of Facebook’s Instant personalization feature the EFF has a guide to disabling it.