danah boyd on why Zuckerberg is wrong to say “Privacy is Dead”
Ethnographer danah boyd, a Microsoft researcher, argues that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is wrong saying that ‘the age of privacy is over’.
“Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me “public by default, private when necessary” but this doesn’t suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.”
[…] some nods of agreement, but also some vehement criticism. The ever-eloquent danah boyd pretty much sums up the backlash: There isn’t some radical shift in norms taking place. What’s changing is the […]