This will come as a welcome update to advocates of online privacy. Why didn’t they implement such a simple feature earlier on? Was it not conducive to their model of a mass online network? If anything, the new stance on privacy will attract the more people and improve the trust of their existing user-base (not to mention, stop the millions who are leaving their service for this reason).

There seems to be two crowds on facebook:

the ‘I got nothing to hide’ crowd with little knowledge about privacy concerns and who presumably aspire towards a life of C-List celebrity stardom and the over paranoid ‘they’re watching us crowd who spend more of their time in the privacy tab of Facebook than actually socializing.

Privacy wasn’t something I took seriously until I recently looked into the means by which people can easily snoop. I spent the last Networks Laboratory for example with a PhD student, scanning local unsecured wireless network traffic and it was possible to see http requests of fellow students. The security vulnerabilities of Wi-Fi aren’t known by most residential users of networks, and a recent BCS article highlights the dangers associated with WEP security - what must now be deprecated in the eyes of security professionals, but not by the masses of residential users. (S. Compton. Wi-fi - what you need to know, 2008 ).

So why aren’t the people most susceptible to these security vulnerabilities in the loop? Perhaps the best way to educate people is by shock and awe . . .when I encounter friends who are flippant about their online privacy, I shall simply add their details to a growing big-brother database with the intention of showing them after a couple of years of simple data collation. At 1000+ contacts in my address book, I already have my own mini facebook database - surely they don’t mind a friend having the details they happily share with the world?

What really needs to change is the terminology we have assigned to data wherein the flippancy really resides. The language we use does not reflect the sensitive nature of data. As Cory Doctorow points out in her Guardian article ‘Why personal data is like nuclear waste‘ - data has a half life, once it is out there, it is extremely difficult to clean up the mess.

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