The economy's recent upward trends remind me of the United States' recovery from the Great Depression. I fondly remember learning about the New Deal in high school and how effective FDR's programs were. I was thinking about what caused the current recovery, only to realize I don't know nearly enough about economics to figure that out. But I was listening to Leo Laporte's Tech Guy (Ep. 663) earlier, and he was talking about Facebook's new privacy settings - specifically how Facebook now is "not the deal we signed up for".
Facebook sold itself to college students as a safe harbor on the internet where all the big bad hackers and authority figures were locked out of. Nothing reinforced that more than restricting users to having a .edu email address. College students could socialize with their friends on the internet without worrying about the creepers and stalkers of MySpace. For a long time, I described Facebook as a 'private' version of MySpace. I could message friends about plans for the weekend and post photos without worrying about trolls or stalkers. My profile was still mine.
I didn't worry when Facebook opened up to everyone. It was a fantastic system and all of my friends were on it. It made a lot of sense to let people with non .edu emails create profiles. I didn't worry though, even if my parents, professors, or managers had a profile, I wasn't friends with them. And if I wasn't friends with them, they couldn't access my profile. By November of 2009, Facebook was making parts of my profile available to the entire internet whether I liked it or not. In December of the same year, my friends, name, profile picture, and likes were all public. These are now 'public my default' and I cannot make them private without deactivating my account.
These radical privacy shifts came on the heels of Twitter's ~2 billion tweets in Q4 of 2009 (Wikipedia). Facebook has emulated Twitter for a while (newsfeed anyone?) and that is not a bad thing per se. However, I created a Twitter account knowing that everything on it was public. When I created my Facebook profile, I filled it with content to be shared with my friends. I listed my favorite music, movies, activities, etc... but I also 'liked' certain pages - some of them political. I'm not any sort of political extremist, but I don't want to advertise my political views on the internet. As a college student looking for a job, I certainly don't want to offend a potential employer that has dealings with China by supporting Tibetan monks. If Facebook is going to make everything public, then that's ok with me, they just need to be open about it and simplify the privacy controls.
Facebook initially attracted me by promising a space for my friends and I to interact on the internet without the whole world watching. Now Facebook is nothing more than a glorified Twitter account to me. Everything I do, say, and post on it I expect to be public either now or in the future. There are plenty of great applications for this. I can learn about new music from Pandora and great new restaurants my friends like via Yelp. It's just not what I signed up for. Facebook has undergone a paradigm shift. The prospect of ad revenue based on users (and their friends) personal preferences has, and will continue to encourage Facebook to trade our personal information for extra zeros in their bank account. This is one New Deal I'm not a fan of.
