Online Privacy: We Just Dont Care

Facebook leaked your data (again). Big Brothers watching everyone and everything. And Google is testing a service that sounds like you providing them a list of everything you own.

Maybe Mark Zuckerberg was right when he said, way back in 2010, that people just dont give a you-know-what about their privacy online.
The Facebook founder didnt quite put it that way. But he came close: People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people, Zuckerberg said, soon after Facebook had drawn ire for making changes to its privacy settings.
The subtext, as U.K. newspaper
The Guardian

said at the time
, was clear. It was also a bit of circular reasoning: The popularity of social sites like Facebook means that people no longer expect privacy on social sites like Facebook. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time, Zuckerberg said.
Devolved would have been the better word choice.
Fast-forward to last Friday afternoon at 4:50 ET, when Facebook quietly copped to a previously undiscovered bug that may have publicly exposed the private contact information of 6 million users.
The note
begins: At Facebook, we take people’s privacy seriously... .
The announcements timing is worth noting. Companies dont share news that they want people to pay attention to just before happy hour on a Friday -- and definitely not on the first day of summer.
The Huffington Post
ran a thorough and rather entertaining
dissection
of Facebooks communications strategy. That strategy appears to have worked: On the grand and growing scale of online data breaches and
privacy brouhahas
, Facebooks prior episodes among them, this one barely generated a yawn.
[ Would you share information about your belongings with Google? Read
Google Mine Wants To Track Your Stuff
. ]
That might have something to do with bigger-picture timing: The latest data breach came right on the heels of
The Washington Posts

report
that both the National Security Agency and FBI have direct lines to the servers of nine major internet companies -- Facebook among them. Hey, whats a few million leaked phone numbers and email addresses when the government has unfettered access to just about everything we do online?
Even with the
Prism revelations
, a funny thing happened: While there was a predictable amount of handwringing and media debate, the general response seemed more like a large collective shrug. In fact, I think that was my actual reaction -- a shrug. It was more unsurprising than unsettling.
Hey, waddyagonnado?
Half of Americans actually approve of the practice, according to recent
Pew Research
polling. There was no mass exodus of users from Facebook, Skype, or any other technology company on the Prism list -- nor Dropbox, which got a Coming Soon pass in the story. We didnt all relocate to abandoned industrial parks and go off the grid like Gene Hackman in
Enemy of the State
. (That movie and its fictional NSA paranoia came out in 1998, by the way.) We probably didnt even re-check our privacy settings in our favorite online services. We talked about it. Made
jokes
about it, even. But we seem more fascinated with Edward Snowdens
catch-me-if-you-can
flight than the actual implications of what he brought to light. Weve already gone on about business and lives.
Fuggedaboutit.
Is there any virtual line in the sand when it comes to online privacy? Is there any limit to what well share openly and with more people than ever before, as Zuckerberg put it? It doesnt seem so. A rumor recently surfaced that Google is testing a new service, in the loosest sense of the word, called Google Mine. As
InformationWeeks
Thomas Claburn noted, Google Mine appears to serve
no one but Google
. You give Google a list of stuff you own -- and thats it. (OK, its a
bit more
than that -- but thats really kind of it.)
Im a heavy user of a variety of Google services -- a modern serf, according to information security pundit
Bruce Schneiers analogy
, and a loyal one at that -- but Im left scratching my head. Why would I ever need Google Mine? Google does not lack for information about me: Email, Internet searches, and so forth. Now I should inventory my house and upload that, too -- while apparently getting nothing in return? (Welcome, burglars!)
Google may have a copy of every email Ive sent during the past seven years or so, but at least Gmail gives me, you know, free email. Yet Ive no doubt that if Google Mine rolled out tomorrow, thousands upon thousands -- and likely millions -- of people would sign up overnight.
Zuckerberg was onto something, though perhaps not for noble reasons. Privacy has evolved to a point of anything but. Many of us, me included, seem awfully comfortable with the apparent reality that there is absolutely no such thing -- and we continue to dump large troves of personal information online. Even Zuckerbergs self-serving logic in those salad days of 2010 is alarmingly sound in hindsight. We dont care about our privacy on the Internet because we use the Internet.
After all, whats the alternative -- drop Google? I dont think they make paper maps anymore. Disconnect Skype? But then Id have to actually start paying for phone calls again. Dont use Facebook? Are you kidding me? What else am I supposed to do with these pictures of my kids?

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Online Privacy: We Just Dont Care