The other day on the Daily Standard Podcast, we mused about whether we could recognize an historic turning point at the time it was happening. Usually, we have to wait for historical perspective to distinguish world-changing moments from the usual alarms and blips of the news cycle.
So it’s probably too soon to predict that Mark Zuckerberg is going to become the Martin Shkreli of social media. But don’t rule it out.
Just as the original stories about Harvey Weinstein set off the #MeToo movement, the latest reports on Facebook could signal the start of a revolution in the politics and culture of privacy. (As evidence, note Irwin Stelzer’s call for government regulation of Facebook in this conservative, free-market magazine.)
I’ll confess that the odds are against this: back in 1999 I wrote a book about the death of privacy, only to conclude afterward that the battle was already lost. Despite paying lip service to personal privacy, Americans had become profligate in the sharing of information, binging on social media platforms that exist to traffic in data about their friends, families, and online sexual proclivities. Leviathans like Facebook and Google rely on the public’s ignorance and/or indifference to the degree to which their business models are based on rummaging through the details of their lives and peddling it to others, occasionally for unseemly purposes.
Until very recently, the public seemed okay with that, or at least numbed to the consequences of their digital nakedness. Or maybe, the anxieties over lost privacy were simply on a long, slow boil, waiting for the moment to explode.
This is the story that might rock Zuckerberg’s world:
If users read to the end of the User’s Agreement, this is all spelled out. But who does that? In that unread fine print, users who wanted to use Facebook’s Messenger application are asked for permission to access incoming and outgoing call and text logs.
Forget for a moment, the outcry that greeted reports that the NSA was scooping up metadata. This is Facebook, and it has been scraping massive amounts of personal data that most users never imagined they were sharing with Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook is in the midst of launching a massive public relations campaign defend itself and reportedly stocking up with D.C. lobbyists to fight off investigations and unwanted regulatory actions. But watch this space: The fight over Facebook and privacy has just begun and it could mark the beginning of a tectonic shift in the media landscape.
