Your Private Information. Who Gets it?
By Shane Patrick
“The information is going to the right people. So giving people control over who sees what helps to increase over-all information now.”
This is Mark Zuckerberg in John Cassidy’s piece from 2006, “Me Media,” discussing what, in its time, was a relatively new approach to social media—proto-facebook’s ability to limit the audience of one’s posts, restricting access to only one’s own friends or their friends, rather than putting beach vacation photos out into the world for anyone to find. “The information” means the content someone posts, and the “right people” that information is reaching are the poster's close friends. I spent an adolescence and young adulthood growing through and with the emerging social media landscape, and I remember a time that these privacy options were nonexistent. Before the rise of Facebook, I created an embarrassingly bad geocities personal page full of personal information as well as links to all of my friends’ pages filled with their personal information. These pages were publicly accessible and could have easily been found by an employer, teacher, law enforcement, or stalker. Looking back, it seems shocking that we were all treating the internet as if it were a pure good and a fun playground, a popularity contest to see who was the best at basic html programming. Look at me, I can embed a midi file. Look at me, I have 16 animated dancing baby GIFs in a row. Look at me, my page’s hit counter added 37 views today. Mark Zuckerberg is only a few years older than I am, and lived inside that internet more fully than I did. If we take him at his word in 2006, this is a man who strongly believed in privacy and the right of people to control access to their content.
Now, read this again: “The information is going to the right people. So giving people control over who sees what helps to increase over-all information now.”
This is an equally accurate description of how Facebook operates today. The information (your personal data) is going to the right people (the advertisers and data merchants.) Giving people (the advertisers and data merchants) control over who sees what (the ads that individual users see, the aggregate information on users that Cambridge Analytica sees and uses to inform its political advertising) helps to increase over-all information now. Your personal data is going to the advertisers and data merchants. Giving them control over your data and the ads you see helps increase over-all information now. In this reading, “over-all information now” is the information that allows the data merchants and advertisers to understand the populace and sell them not only t-shirts and online counseling, but ideas. It seems like you’ve been sad lately—how about buying an outfit, or joining BetterHelp? We all feel sad sometimes, of course. Facebook cares. It seems like you’ve been angry about the changing nature of your community in recent years. Have you considered voting for Rep. Mark Whiteguy, (R-CA)? He’s about border control (sponsored.)
I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg ever reads his old interviews. I don't know what sort of a man he is. I've never been a billionaire, or testified before Congress, or marketed a disruptive technology that fundamentally reformed society and contributed to a catastrophic decline in information literacy. Mark and I, despite being close in age, diverge on some key life experiences. Reading and rereading his quote about what Facebook is supposed to be for, how it differs from other products, is unsettling. "The information is going to the right people." Would Mark feel similarly unsettled? Does he care? Is he a broken husk of a man whose squishy, limited human brain cannot cope with or even conceptualize the impact he's had on society? Perhaps he sits at home, in his sterile mansion, doing an Oppenheimer, thinking to himself that he has become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Perhaps he thinks nothing of the sort. Perhaps instead, Mark just plays with his kids, cooks with his wife, and pets his designer dog. The dog has over two million facebook followers.