Your Private Parts Are Also My Private Parts

A few weeks back, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed that “sharing is the [new] social norm” these days following changes to Facebook’s privacy settings. This is partly true and—as I alluded to in The Social Impact Of Social Media—social media has allowed people to be more open and connect with the people and topics that matter to them.

However, whatever matters to person A might not matter to person B. Sharing information doesn’t imply sharing relevance. Privacy is a matter of context, something that is judged on a semantic scale. Facebook doesn’t control the social norm. We do.

Making privacy something binary results in a decrease of value in privacy and an increase of value in publicity. What if people manipulated these new privacy dynamics to convey only the information that they want people to see? Is that who they really are? Not necessarily. Do other people care? Not necessarily. Does it make them look cooler? Heck yea. As a result, it can spoil authenticity. And that’s not the kind of data that marketers, advertisers and investors are looking for, is it?

An article from last week revealed that only roughly a third of Facebook members changed their privacy settings. If you’re looking for helpful pointers on changing privacy settings, check out this post by AllFacebook.

I welcome your thoughts if you’re willing to share :o)

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