A funny thing happened over Spring Break.
Since Facebook has been in existence, its users have certainly shared in the experience of how the social-media giant has set and changed policy in such a way as to violate users’ privacy — over and over.
And, as expected, the company had reacted to “public” outcry, adjusting its privacy policies and practices to retain its users.
But as more and more steam has built up over the past months on the issue of public institutions and private entities asking for Facebook usernames and passwords as part of the application process, something had to pop.
And pop, it did.
This is hardly a surprise. Such a demand for personal information is an egregious violation of privacy.
And oddly, Facebook reacted to that.
In a statement made during Spring Break, Erin Egan, the chief privacy officer for Facebook, wrote that employers and others seeking “to gain inappropriate access to people’s Facebook profiles or private information … undermines the privacy expectations and the security of both the user and the user’s friends.” Such an action, she writes, could expose these employers to “unanticipated legal liability.”
No doubt this is a strong step to protect citizens and their account information.
If anything, it is a shot across the bow to those employers and others (e.g., college admissions) from exploiting the power they hold over applicants, which would put the latter in an unfortunate quid pro quo situation for a job or a place in a school.
Initially, it was a great relief reading this stance by Facebook. But I think there are bigger issues involved.
The first comes with Facebook set to become a publicly traded corporation, and for reasons beyond the obvious, this isn’t going to be a good thing for users’ privacy.
I say this because once it becomes more profitable not to protect users’ privacy, you can 100 percent guarantee that they will act on that. And with no laws in place, you can kiss your privacy goodbye.
Secondly, Facebook’s defense of users’ privacy just seems … backwards. And backwards in the sense that — as of now — a private company has taken a stance against privacy violations by others, particularly those against its Terms of Service and Use.
This move struck me as decisive in that this question came to mind: Isn’t it the responsibility of the government to protect citizens of violations of privacy by others?
I would think — and hope — so.
For over a decade across the water, the member-states of the European Union and those part of the European Economic Area (i.e., Norway and Iceland) have had the protection of the EU’s 1995 Directive on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (which will more than likely be replaced this year with an updated version).
In it, it is the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens from privacy violations by both public and private entities, with a central government supervisory authority (i.e. an agency) ensuring that.
Simply put, the EU took decades worth of concern for privacy, crafted key principles and values they deemed worthy of protecting and enshrined them into law primarily via this directive.
It is not perfect, but it’s certainly much more than what the U.S. offers its own citizens.
So, when Facebook acted how a government agency needs to act (if ever an American federal data protection agency were created), I began wondering: What is going on here?
Has it really gotten to the point where we have to rely on private companies (like Facebook — though soon to go public) to protect citizens from public institutions and private entities’ intrusions into our private lives instead of trusting the government to provide this protection?
That is really a scary thought.
This kind of protection of citizens needs to come from the government, with the backing and enforcement of laws giving it — and citizens — the tools it needs to protect principles and values surrounding privacy.
Private entities have no such force, except to sue when violations occur. But could we really depend on them to stand behind us — to listen to use, to plead our case — when our privacy is violated?
This situation — the flipping of responsibilities from the government onto private entities — is so ludicrous I almost want to laugh.
I think it shows not only how whack our country has become but also how far we have fallen.