Social Media Ain’t Private

Last week, I engaged in a back-and-forth with a friend of mine about privacy on Facebook.

For those who might not keep up with such things, Facebook has been slammed lately for its attempt to redefine its privacy policies. Yet another Facebook boycott was announced last month and it flopped, much like they all do. But in a digital social network, I argued, is there any presumption of privacy anyway?

A social network is social. It’s conspicuously public. If a user joins a social network and contributes media to the network – in any form – then it’s presumed to be in the public domain, and certainly searchable. And it should be. That’s the mechanism of the Internet: a common platform for sharing and interrelating with anyone, anywhere, at zero cost to the contributor, and, an opportunity for entrepreneurial innovators to use informatics commercially.

I mean, why not? If a person walks into the middle of a town square and starts shouting out all of the celebrities they hate and all of the food they love, there’s no presumption of privacy. That information could be used in any way by anyone. If a bunch of people got together in that town square and discussed something, it’s in plain view: no rights can retained. There’s no “sealed container” here and there’s no private property – there’s no trespass, no theft of property, no reasonable safeguards to protect the event, and absolutely no presumption of privacy.

Now, if the person said nothing at all, that’s fine.  If they said it on private property (which isn’t a social network), that’s fine, too. If it was a direct correspondence protected by federal wiretapping (like email, texting, phone calls, in your home), then there’s a presumption of privacy. If you had a private event, there’s a presumption of privacy. If it’s on private property, there’s a presumption of privacy.

But a social network is social. There can’t be a presumption of privacy and there shouldn’t be, lest the media created by society revert to being private and again “owned”. That’s the benefit of social media: it’s social. It’s property owned by all. And if there’s anything that somebody wants to keep private, they shouldn’t share it, or share it discretely across other forms of technology that has an implicit purpose for conveying private information.

It seems like common sense. Don’t post anything in public that you don’t want to be public. And there shouldn’t be a presumption of privacy for information divulged in a public place.

R

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