Facebook – Security – Prison Doors….and A Piece Of String.

Over the past few months the topic of online security and personal privacy has been somewhat at the forefront of a lot of peoples thinking. Especially with the recent concerns and discussions over Facebooks privacy policy and how they plan to protect our personal data from the beady eyes of the stalking community at large.

I quite like the idea that we’re begging this corporation to take away our personal responsibility for our own privacy and protection. If you’d told me 10 years ago that one day we’ll be begging a company to take away one of our human rights because we’re paranoid and unwilling to take responsibility for ourselves…I’d have called you a madman!

This seems to be where we’re at right now in this Facebook privacy debate.

I’ve spoken to quite a lot of people about this topic and almost every person has based their position on the idea that we need our privacy. Looking back over history, it seems that right now all we HAVE is privacy. We live in our houses with our locked windows and doors, many of us barely even know our next door neighbour let alone the wider community at large, we travel to work in silence refusing to speak to other human beings just centimeters from us, and our daily interactions with other people are almost exclusively limited to people we already know or are forced to interact with due to our jobs.

So what is this online debate about privacy really all about?

What is it that we want to be protected from and how come we’re begging for someone else to take responsibility for this?

The internet has become a medium of communication and information that many of us have become extremely accustomed to. This medium we’re using is known for it’s public exposure, it’s logging and tracking of user activity and it’s transparent communication. We’ve got blogs, logs, diaries, corporations, knowledge and logins. We know this medium well, we’ve been using it for years. So what’s suddenly changed?

I remember a time when people were quite afraid to make payments online. They’d say things like “ooh I can’t put my credit card details into that website, who knows what might happen to all my money”. The same people would then sit in a busy office shouting out their credit card number to an anonymous teenager on the other end of a sales line. Kinda ironic?

To me, the topic of privacy seems like an overreaction to the fear-mongering that’s been presented in much of the media of late. What happened to each person taking responsibility for their actions both online and offline? I know we live in a society that says “where there’s blame, there’s a claim” but is that really how we envisioned our species evolving?

There are certain truths that are ever more prominent these days and because of those truths, it makes sense to take a greater sense of personal responsibility for the things we do, and the things our friends do that directly impact upon our self chosen level of privacy.

If we post things onto the Internet, expect them to be seen. If we put up pictures on the world wide web, expect the world to be able to see them. If our friends take pictures of us at 4:30am on a Saturday morning jumping around and throwing up into public bins before swinging around a lamp post in a 1950’s movie-esq scene, we know they’re going to end up on Facebook or some other photo-sharing site.

Sure, there are always things that happen that we’d rather keep to ourselves and that’s precisely the point. If we want those things we should make them happen.

Taking responsibility for ourselves is about asking those friends not to put pictures of us up on the internet that we wouldn’t want people to see. It’s about saying what we want and not saying what we don’t want the world to know. Most importantly, it’s about asking ourselves…What is it that i’m doing that’s so bad I don’t want other people to find out?

Alternatively we can give up our responsibility to a corporation such as Facebook and then complain when neither them nor us do what we really wanted.

A good friend of mine recently called me and asked about the privacy available on Twitter. The question was regarding setting up a Twitter account for my friends father and he expressed the wish to only allow certain people to follow him such as friends and family and to forcefully block other followers.

In one way I really respect this. It’s quite a good example of someone taking some initiative to find out what security features are built into the system they’re about to become part of and yet, and the same time, I can’t help but wonder what makes people assume that they’re so interesting that other people will care.

That sounds a little cruel but I mean it in the best possible way. Our talk of privacy, protection, security and data protect, all seem to assume some entity or entities out there in the world that care enough about who we are and what we’re doing to go around gathering up our data and using it for their evil deeds. This may well be a truth, after all, this data could be extremely useful to certain corporations or governments. However, if we were really doing things worth tracking and watching, the people wanting to track us or watch us would. They’d find a way of doing that regardless of how much we protect our opinions that we’ve chosen to share with the world.

Wandering around the Tate modern recently reminded me how silly some of our ideas can be about protection and privacy. We spend millions every year securing our homes, protecting our land, buying locks for this and that, setting up alarms to catch bad people and warding off anyone who comes near the things we hold precious. The Tate modern has some of the most expensive art in the country. They have some of the most fragile artworks I’ve seen and how do they protect them against the hordes of people that pass through every single day? A little piece of white string. That’s all it takes to stop people getting too close and potentially destroying something very precious. A little piece of white string.

So what are we really protecting ourselves from? What are we so willing to give up our rights of personal responsibility? What comes next?

What do you think?