Why millennials will learn nothing from Facebook’s privacy crisis
Why millennials will learn nothing from Facebook’s
privacy crisis
By Matthew Hennessey April 7, 2018 | 10:43am
Last year it seemed Mark Zuckerberg was looking for a way
into politics. Now he could be looking for a way out.
The Facebook founder has been called to testify before
Congress starting Tuesday. He’ll face tough questions about how a Trump-affiliated
data-analytics firm got hold of personal information belonging to nearly 90
million of the social-media site’s users. On Wednesday he told reporters he’d
made a “huge mistake” in not prioritizing the protection of user data.
That’s a bit like a casino apologizing for letting you
lose so much money at the slot machines. Facebook exists to sell access to user
data.
“No company better exemplifies the Internet age dictum
that if the product is free, you are the product,” wrote the British journalist
John Lanchester last year. Zuckerberg realized early on that advertisers,
marketers, political opposition researchers, academics and data nerds of all
stripes would kill to get their hands on your likes and dislikes. If he was
going to make any money off his dorm-room doodle he was going to have to sell
you out.
More than a decade into the social-media experiment, we
can no longer claim ignorance about Facebook’s business model. Still we go
right on shoveling wheelbarrows of our most personal information into its
insatiable maw. Facebook knows our politics, our tastes in food, our religious
affiliations and our sexual orientations. It knows who our friends and enemies
are. It has developed taxonomies of our family relationships and work
histories. It tracks us everywhere we go on the Internet. It can identify us by
sight, using digital face-recognition technology to analyze our photos.
We give them everything; they give us — what, exactly?
The “huge mistake” in this arrangement was probably ours.
Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley behemoth that
monetizes personal information. Google, Apple and Microsoft are all inviting
advertisers, researchers and government agencies to find you through their
platforms. What’s revealing about the Cambridge Analytica affair is that
Facebook’s critics seem more exercised about the Trump connection than they do
about the data breach.
Why shouldn’t Facebook let a political firm use the data
it collects? Would you be as upset to learn that they’ve the let the makers of
“Sherlock Gnomes” do the same thing?
Whether this Brave New World keeps you up at night could
depend on your age.
Recent reports have millennials leading the charge to
delete Facebook and other social media. Don’t buy it. If they’re deleting it’s
because they’re bored, not because they’re repulsed by the Cambridge Analytica
affair or suddenly started caring about digital privacy.
I’ve had millennials tell me they don’t worry what
Facebook, Twitter, Amazon or Google know about them because they’ve got nothing
to hide. And anyway, the big tech companies are ambivalent about your personal
peccadilloes, millennials say. They only keep such close tabs because they want
to make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for online.
A 2015 survey by the American Press Institute found just
20 percent of millennials worried “a good deal” or “most of the time” about
online privacy. The vast majority said they never worried or only worried a
little about how much searchable personal information about them was available
on the Internet.
Why such nonchalance among the digital natives about
privacy? Millennials believe that everyone is eventually going to know
everything about them anyway. They think total transparency is the price of
admission to the social-media wonderland. The more you give up, the more you
get in return.
“If today’s social media has taught us anything about
ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the
human impulse for privacy,” wrote Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly in his
2016 book, “The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will
Shape Our Future.”
This is undoubtedly true, but it marks a stark departure
from the attitudes of previous American generational cohorts. The Greatest
Generation would surely have taken a pass on the telephone if the trade-off was
that Ma Bell could eavesdrop on their calls and sell what it learned to Sears
and Roebuck. Baby Boomers and Gen Xers both understood that opening someone
else’s mail was a felonious act.
Millennials have made peace with the idea that they won’t
have any privacy. In fact, they’ve learned to love the idea that nothing is
off-limits, everything is for public consumption and everyone is always on
display. The millennial view of life is a kind of online competition to see who
can curate the most glamorous and mysterious Instagram feed or tweet the most
savagely clever political retort.
Mark Zuckerberg is in many ways the uber millennial. He
appears to believe his youth, energy, intelligence and success entitle him to fly
above it all. He’s managed to build a $500 billion company out of baby pictures
and online surveys while giving away almost nothing about his own personality.
Many will tune in just to watch the billionaire boy wonder squirm.
Entertainment value aside, the upcoming hearings could do
the world a service by reminding us that our personal information is Facebook’s
product. Let’s see how the man who built that system likes it when it’s his
data on display.
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