[Infowarrior] - Why no one cares about privacy anymore

[Richard Forno]

Why no one cares about privacy anymore
by Declan McCullagh
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20000336-38.html

Google co-founder Sergey Brin adores the company's social network  
called Google Buzz. We know this because an engineer working five feet  
from Brin used Google Buzz to say so.
"I just finished eating dinner with Sergey and four other Buzz  
engineers in one of Google's cafes," engineer John Costigan wrote a  
day after the Twitter-and-Facebook-esque service was announced. "He  
was particularly impressed with the smooth launch and the great media  
response it generated."

You might call Brin's enthusiasm premature, especially since privacy  
criticisms prompted Google to make a series of quick changes a few  
days later. Activists have asked the Federal Trade Commission to  
"compel" Google to reprogram Buzz a third time to adhere to the no  
doubt well-informed specifications of Beltway lawyers. A class action  
lawsuit filed on behalf of an aggrieved second-year law student is  
underway.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the courthouse: relatively  
few Google Buzz users seem to mind. Within four days of its launch,  
millions of people proved Brin right by using the messaging service to  
publish 9 million posts. A backlash to the backlash developed, with  
more thoughtful commentators pointing out that Google Buzz disclosed  
your "followers" and who you were "following" only if you had elected  
to publish that information publicly on your Google profile in the  
first place.

My hunch is that Google Buzz will continue to grow because, after  
nearly a decade of social-networking experiences (its great- 
granddaddy, Friendster, started in early 2002), Internet users have  
grown accustomed to informational exhibitionism. The default setting  
for a Buzz message is public, and Buzz-ers using mobile phones are  
prompted to disclose their locations.

Norms are changing, with confidentiality giving way to openness.  
Participating in YouTube, Loopt, FriendFeed, Flickr, and other  
elements of modern digital society means giving up some privacy, yet  
millions of people are willing to make that trade-off every day. Of  
people with an online profile, nearly 40 percent have disabled privacy  
settings so anyone may view it, according to a Pew Internet survey  
released a year ago. The percentage is probably higher today.

No doubt critics of Google Buzz would reply that accidental disclosure  
of some correspondents was ample reason to worry. While it's true that  
privacy options at first were not as obvious as they could have been,  
they did exist. Even the original version let you edit the "auto- 
following" list and preview your profile to see how you'd appear to  
others. (If you're that sensitive about your privacy, especially on a  
free service, why not take a moment to click that link?)

Different people, different privacy preferences

Much of our modern concept of privacy can be traced to a 1890 law  
review article by Samuel Warren and future Supreme Court Justice Louis  
Brandeis. They complained that "the law must afford some remedy for  
the unauthorized circulation of portraits of private persons" and  
sympathized with those who were "victims of journalistic enterprise."

If this sounds like Barbra Streisand's famously futile privacy lawsuit  
against a photographer who dared to take an aerial snapshot of her  
Malibu beach home, it is. What outraged Warren was a rather tame  
society article in a Boston newspaper about a lavish breakfast party  
that he had organized for his daughter's wedding. (Like the censor- 
happy Streisand, Brandeis and Warren paid scant attention to the First  
Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press.)

Fortunately, courts have not embraced all of Warren and Brandeis'  
arguments, and American citizens are not as muzzled today as those two  
would have wished. A lawsuit that a Pennsylvania couple filed against  
Google Street View, for the clearly felonious act of publishing a  
photograph of their house that mirrored what was on the county tax  
assessor's Web site, recently met with an ignominious end.

"As a social good," says Richard Posner, the federal judge and  
iconoclastic conservative, "I think privacy is greatly overrated  
because privacy basically means concealment. People conceal things in  
order to fool other people about them. They want to appear healthier  
than they are, smarter, more honest and so forth." That isn't a  
defense of snooping as much as a warning of the flip side of privacy-- 
concealing facts that are discreditable, including those that other  
people have a legitimate reason for knowing.

The truth about privacy is counter-intuitive: less of it can lead to a  
more virtuous society. Markets function more efficiently when it's  
cheap to identify and deliver the right product to the right person at  
the right time. Behavioral targeting allows you to see relevant,  
interesting Web ads instead of irrelevant, annoying ones. The ability  
to identify customers unlikely to pay their bills lets stores offer  
better deals to those people who will.

Anyone who's spent a moment reading comments on blogs or news articles  
knows that encouraging participants to keep their identities private  
generates vitriol or worse. Thoughtful discussions tend to arise when  
identities are public. Without that, as Adam Smith wrote about an  
anonymous man in a large city in The Wealth of Nations, he is likely  
to "abandon himself to every low profligacy and vice."

Privacy relinquishment is the business model behind exhibitionistic  
start-ups like Blippy.com, which lets users broadcast what they buy  
from Amazon, iTunes, and other sites. Other users are invited to  
submit critiques. After a Blippy user named Joe Greenstein purchased  
an iPhone app titled "SpeedDate--Dating for Singles of any Sex," it  
didn't take long for the discussion to turn risque. One fellow  
wondered: "Are you really 'dating singles of any sex?'" Another asked:  
"What gives, Joe. Did you break up with your gal?" The original poster  
replied: "Yes, to breakup. Yes, to dating singles of any sex."

Location-disclosing services are proliferating. Twitter now permits  
users to include geolocation data in messages, and the company has  
told developers to "encourage" users to enable the feature. Start-ups  
like Brightkite and Loopt let you select who can monitor your GPS- 
derived location, moment-by-moment, through your cell phone. Google  
Latitude is similar; Foursquare and Dopplr let you disclose your  
whereabouts more selectively. A report this week said that Facebook  
may do the same.

Medical privacy is, in some cases, being selectively discarded. Cancer  
patients share intimate details on survivor discussion sites. On  
theKnot.com, theNest.com, and theBump.com, members often tell other  
community members they're pregnant before they tell their families,  
and often don't bother to conceal their identities. These discussion  
areas go beyond support networks; they've become additions to and  
substitutes for in-person conversations.

Commercial data-mining is reaching its apogee at companies like  
Amazon.com, Last.fm, Apple, and Netflix that use it to do nothing more  
sinister than suggest relevant books or movies. Customers applauded  
when Netflix offered $1 million to anyone who could improve its  
recommendation engine; a team including three AT&T researchers claimed  
the prize last September. Netflix's next contest will require entrants  
to crunch millions of chunks of demographic data, including age, sex,  
ZIP code, and previously rented movies, and then predict which movies  
those people will like.

Generation X-hibitionist

If any of this concerns you, then you didn't grow up with the  
Internet. It's difficult to overstate how thoroughly today's youth-- 
call them Generation X-hibitionist--have adjusted to living in a world  
of porn spam and Viagra ads that utterly lacks quaint 20th-century  
conceptions of privacy. (When dealing with the police, privacy is a  
Fourth Amendment right; when dealing with Blippy, it's a mere  
preference.)

A 2008 Harris Interactive/CTIA survey of more than 2,000 American  
teens confirms that youth are least worried about privacy. Only 41  
percent were concerned; 59 percent were happy to provide personal  
information to marketers. Compare this to a Harris poll conducted in  
1998, the same year Google was founded, that found a remarkable 80  
percent of people were hesitant to shop online because of privacy  
worries. Fast forward 12 years and we're bragging on Blippy about what  
we bought with our Mastercard.


"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more  
information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people-- 
and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time."
--Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook
Perhaps this disinterest in traditional concepts of privacy is one  
reason why Twitter (originally public) is growing so much faster than  
Facebook (originally private). While Facebook's remarkable share of  
global Internet eyeballs doubled last year, according to Alexa.com,  
Twitter's grew tenfold.

Because Facebook has such a large audience, it can no longer grow as  
fast. But one advantage that Twitter has is that its founders  
intentionally chose openness and offered simpler choices. With mere  
followers instead of friends, there's no need to worry about whether  
someone qualifies as an intimate or not.

Much of this change is generational. But it also happens when folks  
old enough to remember cassette tapes and President George H.W. Bush  
become more comfortable with disclosure. It was only three years ago  
that Time magazine wondered if Google Street View was "an invasion of  
privacy." Now even municipal IT departments, including those of  
Atlanta and Lynchburg, Va., have found uses for it. Does anyone  
remember when the Electronic Privacy Information Center claimed in  
2004 that Google's Gmail somehow violated wiretap laws? Hundreds of  
millions of satisfied users later, we know that nobody else cared.

At a technology conference in January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg  
told his audience that Internet users don't care as much about privacy  
anymore. The 25-year old said that, in the seven years since he  
started the company, "people have really gotten comfortable not only  
sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with  
more people--and that social norm is just something that has evolved  
over time." Zuckerberg defended the company's decision in December to  
push users to reveal more, saying "we decided that these would be the  
social norms now and we just went for it."

That change drew the same wails of protest that greeted Google Buzz.  
Advocacy groups wrote an alarmist note to federal regulators demanding  
an injunction on grounds that the changes "harm the public interest"-- 
effectively substituting a small clique's privacy preferences for  
everyone else's. The ACLU announced a letter-writing campaign. The  
Federal Trade Commission noted, ominously, that Facebook's changes are  
"of particular interest to us." About the only thing missing--no doubt  
a press release is being drafted this very moment--is a class action  
lawsuit to enrich plaintiffs' attorneys while resulting in no  
measurable changes to Facebook.com.

But as regulatory enthusiasts in Washington were attempting  
ritualistic divinations of the public interest, something different  
was happening on the Web: the actual public didn't care. Instead of  
abandoning the site en masse, Facebook users clicked through a few  
menus of options and went on with their lives. A protest group titled  
"Facebook! Fix the Privacy Settings" drew a mere 3,400 of more than  
350 million users, less than one-thousandth of 1 percent. Compare that  
unconcern with the number of people who turned their attention to such  
weighty topics as "Chuck Norris Facts" (more than 225,000), "Physics  
Doesn't Exist, It's All Gnomes" (more than 76,000), and "I Flip My  
Pillow Over To Get To The Cold Side" group (nearly 1 million).

One reason why Zuckerberg's who-needs-privacy argument works is that,  
through a growing collection of these services with unusual vowel  
counts, we're choosing what to share. Unlike interactions with  
government snoops, these are voluntary: Give up a bit of privacy to  
get a service for free, and everyone benefits (except perhaps rivals  
that used to charge).

Zuckerberg's own approach to privacy mirrors his company's. His public  
Facebook profile shows him snuggling up to a teddy bear and attempting  
to walk while tied to what appears to be a co-worker dressed as a  
banana. Another photographic montage captures Zuckerberg at his  
sister's wedding in Jamaica, smiling bravely while wearing a  
fluorescent vest matching the bridesmaids' turquoise gowns.

There are photos of Zuck The Party Animal at a 2006 kegger, and others  
with his girlfriend Priscilla at an honest-to-goodness Silicon Valley  
bison roast. The most telling informational tidbit may be that the  
Keds-sporting entrepreneur is, officially and publicly, a "fan" of  
himself.

Perhaps the real issue is not technology but psychology. Irwin Altman,  
a professor emeritus in the University of Utah's psychology  
department, created one of the more widely cited theories of privacy  
before Facebook's founder was born. "If one can choose how much or how  
little to divulge about oneself to another voluntarily, privacy is  
maintained," Altman wrote, effectively blessing the social media of a  
generation later. "If another person can influence how much  
information we divulge about ourselves or how much information input  
we let in about others, a lower level of privacy exists."

Now those boundaries are so fluid. Fifty years ago Mark Zuckerberg  
would have been seen as disclosing far too much information. Doesn't  
that guy need help, or at least therapy? Now it makes him a very  
normal, by the standards of his generation, Internet billionaire.

Disclosure: The author is married to a Google employee who was not  
involved with Google Buzz.