“What’s on your mind, Gary?”
Facebook has been asking me this question a lot lately. Maybe you’ve been getting it too. I’ve been delaying my answer, partly because I’m not sure Facebook really cares. I’m also pretty sure it already knows the answer.
In case you missed it, Facebook recently pulled another no-no in the public sphere. This time it played too nicely with a data mining company that mined a little too much user data and wasn’t above sharing it with others. Elon Musk closed the Tesla and SpaceX Facebook pages, ordinary people got angry and demanded justice, and then something else significant happened, but no one knows what it was because it wasn’t covered on Facebook.
So far, I’m not sure how I feel about my private data being disseminated around the world. Who knows? Maybe there’s no such thing as real privacy anymore. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg, Julian Assange, and Steve Google (if that’s his real name) are all sitting in a European castle overlooking a fjord, sorting through all our private data. Maybe we’re all living in The Matrix.
Meanwhile, I’m over here thinking maybe it isn’t such a big deal.
Don’t get me wrong—I can see how it’s a problem for many folks. After all, no one wants the entire world to know all the details of their lives. I should be able to share my credit card number with Amazon.com without having it used for someone who wants to finance a small army. That seems like a fair expectation.
But there are reasons people release their personal data into the ether, and though they aren’t necessarily bad ones, they’re worth considering. At the very least, from a social media standpoint, users share things because they want other people to see them. It’s simple. If I post photos of my dogs, I want you to see my dogs. If I snap and upload a picture of myself in Rio De Janeiro, I’m cool with you knowing I visited Rio De Janeiro. If I share a post from my favorite political candidate, I want you to know I support that person. Unless, of course, I just don’t understand how cameras and social media work.
Then there’s a higher level of sharing, like our friends and neighbors who post twenty-five filtered selfies a day, check in at every stop light, restaurant, church, and watering hole they frequent, or take every quiz thrown out on Facebook: “Which Teletubby Are You?,” “Only A True Gilmore Girls Fan Knows the Answers to All of These Questions,” or “Upload a Selfie and Discover Your Founding Father Doppelganger.”
This mega-sharing seems to reflect a need to show the world who we are, or more accurately who we want them to think we are. A couple of years ago, I read a story about a woman who was arrested for breaking into expensive houses so she could take selfies. She got caught because someone saw a familiar fancy commode in the background of one of her photos. I’m guessing the woman either wanted her friends to think she was suddenly, inexplicably living in a swanky house, or she just wasn’t very bright. Possibly both.
In an episode of the science fiction series Black Mirror called “Be Right Back,” a woman has her dead lover “rebuilt” based on details from his online data. As most Black Mirror installments are, this was an excellent episode, but I walked away thinking that for most us, this kind of procedure would probably result in copies that bear little resemblance to the originals. Instead of being me, in this scenario the re-created person would be the amalgamation of everything I wanted the world to believe about me. That would make for an interesting story.
As all this takes place, many of us still maintain a perfectly understandable desire for privacy. So maybe I should be concerned that my data is being commodified and sold to the highest bidder. Honestly, I’ll probably become very concerned when some basement dwelling hacker depletes my bank account to buy a thousand dollars’ worth of iTunes gift cards.
Until then, I’ll keep sharing the same things I always have. I’m not overly concerned about people knowing what books I like, where I spend my money, or how many times per month I eat Thai food. Especially if someone wants to give me free books, money, or Thai food.
In that case, we should definitely talk.
