“Mr. Zuckerberg, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!”
In 1987, then-President Ronald Reagan made an emphatic plea to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the wall that separated East and West Berlin. (If you’ve never heard about this, you can read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tear_down_this_wall! After you have read it, immediately file a lawsuit against your 7th grade civics teacher for malfeasance.)
At the time, this exhortation was considered “provocative” by the Soviet Union and was hardly covered at all by the press in the United States. The two countries were locked in a Cold War that had been going on for nearly 50 years. East Berlin had always been closed off and it was always going to be that way… until suddenly it wasn’t. It only took two years after those words were exclaimed, and then just like that — some said “over night” — people sledgehammered their way though the wall. And in a flash, Berlin was open, the wall was down, and the world has never been the same.
Fast forward to 2018 and we watch with a sense of voyeuristic pleasure as the personification of social networking gets grilled by people three times his age, barely capable of understanding what “the Facebook” is or why they should care about a “Like” (check that, they LOVE the “likes”). Even my mother watched these hearings! I don’t know what to make of that circus, but I am confident that whatever happens, Congress will be impotent at best and dangerous at worst in their attempts to mollify their constituents.
They’ll over correct and pass legislation that is obsolete as soon as it’s signed. If we rely on Mr. Zuckerberg, we will have to match his “privacy theater” with actual impact. Ten years of dust-ups convinces me that neither he nor his company are willing to make the pivot required (https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/10/a-brief-history-of-facebooks-privacy-hostility-ahead-of-zuckerbergs-testimony/). (And let’s be clear: neither the board of Facebook nor its investors want that change either. Just check their stock price.)
I actually think it’s unfair to ask Mr. Zuckerberg to change his company. In many ways, he’s been straight-forward with us. He asked for our information…AND WE GAVE IT TO HIM WILLINGLY! We really shouldn’t blame him. What we should be doing is asking ourselves what we, as individuals, should demand from platforms like his.
Clearly we care about being manipulated. In the offline world we generally react negatively to being purposefully pushed in one direction or another. We prefer subtlety. We prefer full disclosure. We prefer to think that we’re free agents in the game of information processing and that it’s our choice to order our extra shot, no-foam soy latte without disclosing any personal information. If that’s the case, what can we demand of Facebook to better match that offline experience?
How about first opening up the platform? I mean tear down the wall that prevents me from seeing how personal information fuels the Facebook revenue engine. All public companies have to disclose what they take in, how they use that revenue, and what their profits are. I have a legal right to see what my credit looks like, who makes inquiries, and how they categorize me (let’s ignore that little Equifax problem for a minute). Hell, even the big, bad, US Government has to respond to Freedom of Information Requests filed by groups like Judicial Watch. Why not insist that any data miner, defined as any company that uses advertising as a source of revenue, make that same level of transparency available to its users?
As my favorite Supreme Court Justice, Louis D. Brandeis, is often quoted as saying:
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant…”
The actual full quote is:
“Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
— Other People’s Money And How the Bankers Use It (1914)
The point is simple: transparency is the cure-all for perceived or actual slights. In this case, knowing where my data is going — who is buying and selling it, and which pieces of my Facebook life, social graph, interests, moods, locations and apps I use are of interest to Coke, Delta Airlines or the Russians — would give me some comfort that I have given my informed consent, intelligently. The beauty of this suggestion is that it requires no new legislation and doesn’t require us to do something we’re clearly not going to do: namely, #DeleteFacebook. It simply applies the brightest of lights to the heretofore hidden exchange we’ve all been making with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Google, Snap, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and every other site that offers its services for free.
Now these app makers will certainly say “hey Steve, anyone can find that stuff in our Terms of Service and Privacy Policies…we’re already doing this.” To which I say in my best Dwight Schrute voice: FALSE. First, the Terms of Service game is one of the greatest frauds perpetrated by Silicon Valley and its orgy of lawyering. No one can comprehend them. And even assuming you’re that 1% who does, in fact, understand them, you’d spend 76 days of every year reading them based on the average number of sites, apps and changes made. But guess what? No one ever reads them! If you don’t believe that, just watch Season 15, Episode 1 of South Park…you’ll never click the same way again. I bet you didn’t know that everything you write on Google Docs is Google’s property according to their ToS. Don’t believe me? Go read it. Third, having had to create a ToS myself, they are 95% written to protect the company from lawsuits, people doing bad things with your offering, and protecting the company’s intellectual property. Oh, and in the case of the aforementioned companies, the ToS are there to tell you that they reserve the right to do anything they want with the personal information you provide.
All the fake indignation and disingenuous apologies aside, the easiest solution to the “privacy problem” that exists for Facebook et al., is to demand they tear down the wall. Let us know what they’re actually doing and let us “self-determine” our personal data the way Gorbachev let the people of the Eastern Bloc countries — previously constrained under the boot of the Soviet Union — self-determine how they wanted to be governed.
By the way Mark, Gorbachev won a Nobel Prize for tearing down his wall. Imagine what you’d win? #CluckforZuck2020
