I’m thinking of something and I want you to guess what it is.
Some clues:
It can be bought and sold. It can save and ruin your life. People pay a lot of money to hide it and even more money to share it. It can break and mend hearts, markets and governments. Some governments try to control it more than others. It can be true and false, believed and ignored. It can be viral but has no physical structure. If you have the right kind of it, you can win a Pulitzer, a World War, an election or a poker game. It is often associated with technology and systems and superhighways. We are living in its age.
That’s right, I’m talking about…
INFORMATION
If you haven’t heard about the latest Facebook brouhaha (not the 25 random things thing–though you can listen to our very own Scott Lamb’s insightful NPR commentary on this topic here), Facebookers were outraged when the website announced that it would retain users’ content even after they terminate their accounts.
Or put another way by the blog Consumerist:
“Anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever”
According to today’s New York Times, however, Facebook has just done an about-face in response to user protest and plans to reevaluate their policy. Updates to follow, I guess.
ANYWAY, the big Facebook fight of ’09 got me thinking about who really owns our information? And for that matter, is information something that can be owned? Information isn’t a thing. It’s more like a force. And no one can really own a force. You can try to control it Yoda-style but a) control is illusive; and b) controlling and owning are two different things.
Can Facebook users really claim to own information about where we went to college, political affiliation, residence, marriage status etc.? These things are all in the public record–and have been since before the information age.
A good archivist can probably find out where your grandfather went to high school, whether or not your kooky great-aunt was ever married, the address of your great-great-great grandmother’s first tenement, if your ancestors owned slaves or were themselves owned (or both), the actual year that your cousin who always lies about her age was born etc.
In a way, Facebook is just a mega-public record. The good news is that users have some degree of control over how much you want to share. You don’t have to tell the world that you broke up with your boyfriend or that you’re going to a raging party tonight. But once it’s out there, it’s out there.
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Kidz Today is a column about youth and education by Joie Jager-Hyman
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 1:16 pm and is filed under General, Pop Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
There are currently 5 responses
The information that you are talking about is not the problem. People can post their creative videos, poems, stories, and other intellectual property – yes it is their choice to send it out into the world through a social network – but should they decide to take it down or leave that network community the rights to their work should return to them. There is a question of ownership of intellectual property.
To another point, while people should be far more discriminate in what they post to sites like face book – there is still an illusion of privacy. The foolish college student that posts a photo of themselves at 17 when they were wasted – might not want that photo to haunt them for the rest of their lives and at 30 might want it to disappear into oblivion. However, if face book owns that content it might come up to bite them at 40.
We should take responsibility for not getting it when we post these things but at 13, 14, 18 or even older we can make mistakes. They don’t always have to haunt you. We don’t need another “Big Brother” to throw it back at us.
I think the issue of owning information is an interesting one, but I want to speak to another aspect of the recent Facebook brouhaha, as you called it. It’s noteworthy that Facebook changed their new policy in response to the public’s opposition to said policy. Even though Facebook tried to get away with something that seems pretty scary to me, I find it somewhat comforting that people’s voices were actually heard and the new policy was overturned.
As someone who works in education, I cannot tell you how many articles are out there about teachers who lost their jobs because of careless facebook postings (which is why I don’t have a profile there). While I agree that facebook should retract the aforementioned policy, perhaps this little scare will jolt people into considering more carefully what they put out there. While you control the content of “your” profile, it’s not your website! Wake up folks!
I saw an announcement on Face Book today about their reevaluating their policy. I was not aware of the situation and am glad to now understand. Even if I delete everthing in my account can they still retain that information somehow?
I don’t think twice about posting information, but my friend’s husband does not want her to post pictures of their child to FB for some reason. I do not know what he is afraid of, but respect that people have fears about the potential ramifications of too much information.
Thanks for the food for thought.
I agree with Mr. Michael, perhaps this little kerfuffle will serve as a wake-up call. If you live your life publicly online, sharing your every daily movement, trip to the gym or random thought, it shouldn’t come as such a shock to find out that a slice of your privacy has disappeared, or that you no longer “own” certain information about yourself. It seems that we own our information until we upload it and give it to the world.