Salvatore Iovene

The Inter­net is now com­pletely sat­u­rated by peo­ple whin­ing about pri­vacy on Face­book, or lack thereof. I hon­estly fail to see, for instance, how its pri­vacy set­tings should be a bewil­der­ing tan­gle of options. Face­book has hun­dreds of mil­lions of users, so yes, it is going to be com­pli­cated to han­dle the pri­vacy set­tings. Besides the fact that it really isn’t. And so what if its pri­vacy state­ment has a larger word count than the Con­sti­tu­tion of the USA? Face­book has a hun­dred mil­lions users more than USA has cit­i­zens. One glove does not fit all hands, and they need their legalese.

I agree: upgrad­ing pri­vacy set­tings so that they are less secure than they used to is not the right way to go, but every­body is free to change them the best way they can. The more I observe the debate evolve, the more it looks like it’s founded on con­spir­acy the­o­rist delusions.

This isn’t sim­ply a mat­ter of “Face­book is the only game in town, so they can and will do what­ever they want”. Face­book comes for free, and it’s not really some­thing I would include amongst the must-have ser­vices, like fresh water. So you don’t need it, and don’t have to use it. If the sole fresh water sup­plier in your town started to pol­lute the water inten­tion­ally, say so that they could sell med­i­cine with the other com­pany they own, then you would have a problem.

Oth­er­wise, there’s noth­ing here. What? Rais­ing pub­lic aware­ness? I see. You can do that with­out try­ing to orga­nize Facebook-quitting days. It’s OK to talk about it, and indeed I’m doing it right now myself. But I’m just doing it in a more con­struc­tive way: check the safety of your pri­vacy set­tings by fol­low­ing the instruc­tions at http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/, and fix them to suit your needs.

Just don’t go blog­ging that Face­book is evil. You think you can just found a start-up and make a non-evil Face­book replace­ment? How long until you’re sink­ing in the bills from the host­ing com­pany, and start think­ing that “hey, maybe I should put ads on this thing”, and then, when the ads don’t pay enough, you start think­ing that “hey, per­haps I should tar­get the ads bet­ter: I need to share more infor­ma­tion about the users with the ad providers”. And so on.