People Don’t Want Privacy?
January 11th, 2010 by ComputerBob
This is my Web site.
Over the years, I’ve posted a lot of personal stories about the struggles that I’ve been through and the lessons that I’ve learned.
But I’ve always done it “anonymously”: You won’t find my full name — or even the name of the town where I live — anywhere on this site. Even my domain registrant information is protected by an anonymizing feature that my domain registrar provides for a yearly fee.
Those are the choices that I made a long time ago, to protect myself from “weirdos on the Internet.”
Because I have my own Web site and I do all of its back-end work myself, I don’t need to use Facebook or Myspace or any of the other online services that make it easy for non-technical people to have their own Web sites. And because I’m in control of both the back end and the front end of my Web site, I have a lot more control over my data’s privacy and security than do people who use those social networking sites.
Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of complaints from users of those online services, from people who discovered to their horror that their service providers had suddenly changed their online privacy settings without their knowledge or permission, which turned what they had intended to be “private” data that only a few “friends” could see, into “public” data that the whole world could see.
Knowing that Google, Facebook and other free-service providers make billions and billions of dollars a year from exploiting their users’ private data, I’m never surprised to read such accounts. But I’m surprised and disappointed that I haven’t seen a whole lot of backlash against Facebook and other providers for doing that sort of thing to their users.
It’s almost like people have been brainwashed into thinking that their private data is worthless anyway; that they don’t have any privacy anyway; so it’s OK for online service providers to routinely exploit their private data to make billions of dollars of profit.
And who’s been doing that brainwashing?
People like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who recently said, “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”
Don’t believe it, folks. People like Zuckerberg make billions and billions of dollars every year from exploiting their users’ private data.
They know exactly how valuable private data is.
That’s why they’re always cynically trying to convince you to give them yours.
While they keep their own private data locked down and secured.
Like mine is.
And like yours should be.
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Tags:
Consumer Info, Cybercrime, Dubious, Ethics, Friends, Internet, Personal, Psychology, Rights, Security