‹ Twitter summary for 2010-01-11 — Arianna's welcome to Tucker on dailycaller points out journolazy he said/ she said ›

the rumpus.net facebook employee interview and your privacy

Interesting timing, I was scheduled to do a media interview on something related to how social media sites monitor groups and police them for dangerous, offensive or hateful content and this little nugget comes out.

Conversations About The Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee – The Rumpus.net.

The comments have a discussion going about how employees at sites can read all your information and some common expectations of privacy. This also comes on the heels of yesterday’s discussion on twitter about Zuckerberg saying something to the effect that living publicly is the new norm.

From the perspective as a former IT chief and also as a communications professional/academic, let me assure all. The only thing that keeps you private is the lack of interest among the people who could snoop on you, or the value of their time vs. the value of your information to them or some buyer.

Credit card companies and other institutions have been selling your purchasing habits and addresses for decades in lump lists. This type of targeted advertising predates behavioral targeted online advertising and can be viewed as intrusive, or as a service to help you get things you may be more interested in.

Most dbase admins or mail system admins can pop in and read whatever they want on their own environments. Server admins can comb logs to find haters and trolls and liars, and we’ve outed more than a few in the news media and also helped some people who were abusing company computers to find new employment choices. In IT security, there are any number of ways to crack in from the outside and hackers find new ones all the time that not only prey on system weaknesses, but more likely social actual individuals to compromise systems.

But seriously, is this any different than the locks you put on your doors and windows? If someone wants to break in and has the skills to do it, they will find a way. The barriers to entry may discourage them to move on to easier marks where less effort may get decent rewards, but if you have something they want more than their moral own moral code, it is pretty hard to discourage them. But of course, online, they leave evidence, and again it is up to enforcement to decide if what you lost is worth pursuing and if there is a case to make.

So really, it does come down to how interesting you are or not. Kind of like social media success. If you’re modest and boring, chances are no one will bother to mess with you, but then again, you chances are you won’t be interesting enough to have people pay attention to you either.