by: danah boyd
Last night, i asked will Facebook learn from its mistake? In the first paragraph, i alluded to a "privacy trainwreck" and then went on to briefly highlight the political actions that were taking place. I never returned to why i labeled it that way and in my coarseness, i failed to properly convey what i meant by this.
When i sat down to explain the significance of the "privacy trainwreck," a full-length essay came out. Rather than make you read this essay in blog form (or via your RSS reader), i partitioned it off to a printable webpage.
Facebook's "Privacy Trainwreck": Exposure, Invasion, and Drama
The key points that i make in this essay are:
- Privacy is an experience that people have, not a state of data.
- The ickyness that people feel when they panic about privacy comes from the experience of exposure or invasion.
- We've experienced the exposure hiccup before with Cobot. When are we going to learn?
- Invasion changes social reality and there is a cognitive cap to being able to handle it.
- Does invasion potentially result in a weakening of meaningful social ties?
- Facebook lost its innocence this week.
Please enjoy this essay and forward it on to both technology folks and Facebook participants. I would like to hear feedback!
Original post: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2006/09/08/facebooks_priva.html
