Posted by Joe Day

Privacy has become the hot-button of the hour thanks to Facebook’s open social graph. Pundits and bloggers everywhere have mourned the move, proclaiming the death of privacy. A brave few have defended Facebook, saying its open social graph is visionary and the right move for it’s 450+ million users. 

Privacy. A living thing?

For all the talk about Facebook’s privacy issue, nobody seems to be dialing in on the big picture of privacy itself. While Zuckerberg asserts Facebook is merely following social norms and the pundits say we shouldn’t be surprised because we opted in and decided to use Facebook to share our lives, the conversation tends to describe privacy as a sort of dynamic, directional organism with sensitivities that can cause it to live or die. It paints a picture that the web, and Facebook in particular, are external forces acting upon privacy, moving it toward extinction. If we are to understand privacy, then this premise needs to be questioned. 

Privacy is a tool

Privacy is dead, but not in the way it’s been reported. It never was alive in the first place because it is nothing more than a tool we’ve created to enable the exchange of sensitive information. Just like with any tool, it can be used effectively or not. For instance, long before the web if you wanted to have a private conversation you’d go to another room, lower your voice, and converse. If the walls were thin or if the room was bugged, privacy would be compromised, but that doesn’t mean privacy was dead. Done right, it has always been an effective tool for sharing information not intended for public consumption. It has always been dead, and that’s why it works.

What does privacy actually look like on the web?

Let’s briefly look at banks. If a major bank were to spontaneously change their privacy policy to “totally public,” making all their customer data available and selling spending habits to Yelp and Microsoft to help enhance a user’s browsing experience by delivering customized information to produce relevant content to the user, they’d cease to exist in a matter of minutes. Obviously, privacy has a place. Obviously, this is an extreme example. 

Honoring privacy is a choice

At the highest level, companies like Facebook have a choice to honor privacy or not. Twitter is a great example. By default, user accounts are public unless the user decides to lock theirs down, removing it from search and requiring approval when someone wants to follow. The question is whether privacy will be honored or not. This is why the arguments that privacy is dead are getting a little absurd, and why so many are shocked at Facebook’s changes. When they thought they were sharing with family and friends, suddenly they were sharing with the world, which is not what they signed up for. There’s nothing unreasonable about people adjusting to the change by deleting their Facebook account. That level of public was never in most Facebook users’ minds.

In the social sphere, what does privacy look like?

It’s a combination of public and private. There’s a need for both and the conversation must take into account groups of people–communities–not just individuals. It is easiest to envision when you think of a family. A family may host a neighborhood BBQ. They also have family chats which are private by nature that the neighborhood is not invited to. The “privacy is dead” camp suggests that the social web can’t handle both of these scenarios, and reaveal a major hole in their understanding of “social.”

What does this mean for the church?

In real life The church is very much like a family. It mobilizes to serve its community. It has meetings for members. It needs a way to share prayer requests that are more private in nature. It needs a place to discuss plans for upcoming events. The church needs public and private.