Online social privacy...... Get over it

All this talk about Facebook privacy has me shaking my head in disbelief. So perhaps it's time for a little education. And by education, I really mean spouting my opinion.

There's a reality about using the (unprotected, public) web that just is not understood by the masses. There really is no privacy on the web. This is an essential truth for a number of reasons.

For starters, search engines have perfected the art of finding and cataloguing everything that exists on the web. Depending on how much of an unprotected presence you have created online, you might be surprised to see what can easily be found out about yourself just by doing a quick Google search on your name. Although there are measures you can take to prevent search 'spiders' from 'crawling' and cataloguing your information, this requires work and one missed detail potentially renders your efforts meaningless.

Next, sites like Facebook exist to provide a service, but they have to be able to recoup their costs of doing business somehow. Advertising is a start, but when a site is as big and complex as Facebook, basic advertising alone won't cut it. They need to find another way to generate revenue. So one has to appreciate that the people at Facebook are going to leverage what data they have in their possession to the maximum. This data is your personal information. Your profile details, your status, your likes and dislikes (as detailed in what you click 'Like' in your newsfeed), the content of your comments, which photos you view and how long you stay viewing them.

In the world of business and data intelligence, you can't begin to put a price or value on this kind of information. Patterns start to emerge from the exabytes of data collected on people and this helps predict trends, achieve effective targeted advertising (which earns much more revenue), in fact, the real value of this data has yet to be disclosed or even used to its full potential for that matter.

But this brings me to main reason I wrote this article. What everyone has to understand is that if we continue to want to use the internet's social tools for free, someone has to pay the piper. I hear a lot of disgruntled people exclaim 'I'm quitting Facebook because I don't need this crap'. If you wish to remain a player in tomorrow's culture and society, you have no choice but to participate. More and more you're going to find that in order to participate in one thing online, you'll need to be established somewhere else. To imagine that you can avoid this and still be a relevant player is naive. You can try to seed the pool with false data, but the algorithms will just learn to ignore your data. Sooner or later, you'll be forced to correct what's fake and play along. Or be left behind.

Is it pretty? No. But it is part of the ongoing evolution of the accumulation, use and sharing of data. But this data is available for us to leverage as well. Thanks to the internet and everyone on it, I have reconnected with former friends, workmates and classmates with relative ease. I have exponentially increased my network of people that helped me get my current job. I have no difficulty finding things I like online and have no end of help from real people and useful services. I can tell how good a hotel, restaurant, car and movie is before I even get to see it with my own eyes. I not only learn how to use and even fix the things I own, but I also get to see if I'm the only one having issues. This is really just the tip of the iceberg.

Put these words aside for 5 years and re-read the article again. You'll look back on this time and wonder what we were thinking. Privacy. It's become a fantasy.