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Journalism of Courage
If you visited your Facebook page yesterday,you would have been met by a typically restrained notice on top. It would have told you that you had improved privacy controls which were easier to navigate. The vast majority of Facebooks users probably shrugged and ignored it. But it follows a storm of protest from some of Facebooks users over the networking sites constantly changing and complex controls over what you can share with which of the sites other users.
The jury is still out on the new privacy settings mechanism,though it is immediately apparent that they are more user-friendly. The larger question of corporations and privacy remains unanswered,however. There are real questions to be asked about transparency about user data. But the lazy categorisation of corporations such as Facebook or Google perennially an object of suspicion for the privacy-panicked as information suckers of the same nature as are governments should be rejected.
They might be more dangerous: they arent responsible to the citizenry as a whole,and have powerful incentives to collect personal data if their business models are based on collecting information about you. But they might be considerably less dangerous,too: unlike with your government,you can always opt out,committing Facebook suicide,after all. The stuff you share is voluntary as long
as you know youre doing so,of course. Most importantly,we shouldnt rush to judge how much people are willing,or not willing,to share. Facebook got a lot of flak for assuming people wanted to share,not to hide. Those disturbed by that,most of them not of the generation that grew up online,might just be a noisy minority of its users.
