Netmino

Today Facebook is catching more and more criticism from users, but especially from “authorities” like journalists, bloggers or politicians.

For some like Openbook or Facebook Protest it is not far from the guerilla we knew at the time of the “netiquette“!

And this is normal since the privacy policy of Facebook is far from transparent as explained in a wonderful graphic on the NYT!

But it’s more important to understand that for Facebook – exactly as for Google – we are their products NOT their customers! Both make indeed money only by selling the audiences that the users are! And they are very successful because most users were very cheap to acquire (see my previous post) and benefit in exchange for services they have become addicted.

And ultimately the real question is whether we are interesting products for the marketers to which we have been sold: have they sold enough products or services to justify all the money they paid to Facebook and Google? And can they actually measure the return on investment?

Fortunately there are gurus to reassure the marketers!

Very interesting study introducing the two notions of privacy as

• Control over Personal Information

• Dignity

As explained in the paper, the first notion is mainly applied in the U.S. and the second one in Europe.

Today the leading Online Social Networks (OSN) like Facebook or LinkedIn, act in the U.S. and so

“propagate a notion of privacy as user control. However, online social networking poses a fundamental challenge to the theory of privacy as control. A high degree of control cannot preclude the possibility that online socializers would post unflattering, defamatory, or personal information about each other, and that this information would in turn be available to a large, if not unrestricted, online audience. Many online socializers post personal information seemingly without much concern over the loss of control, yet it seems that online socializers react with indignation when their personal information is accessed, used, or disclosed by individuals perceived to be outside their social network.

The findings presented here (in the study you can download) indicate indeed that online socializers have developed a new and arguably legitimate notion of privacy online, that if accepted by OSNs, will offer online socializers both control and protection of their dignity and reputation. We call this notion network privacy. According to network privacy, information is considered by online socializers to be private as long as it is not disclosed outside of the network to which they initially disclosed it, if it originates with them, or as long as it does not affect their established online personae, if it originates with others. OSNs, as businesses profiting from socializing online, are best positioned to offer online socializers, often the young and vulnerable, effective protection in accordance with their notion of network privacy above and beyond regular measures of personal information control, and they should be required to do so.