"The Kids Don't Care" Is a Stupid Argument

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February 19, 2008

"The Kids Don't Care" Is a Stupid Argument

Leave it to a Google lawyer to reiterate one of the dumbest "arguments" going regarding user privacy.

A column published at the NYT today considers the issue of privacy and social networking, noting the shear between our ability to control the privacy we enjoy off the 'net and our relative inability to do the same with our virtual privacy.

I'm not any better than anyone else when it comes to the occasional "dude posts something stupid on the Web somewhere, career & reputation go up in a fiery cocktail of lameness and cruel luck" story. I have to read that kind of thing the same way my wife reads People.

I kind of like People, too, I guess. At least, I like entering a dialog with the content on its cover, along with the covers of all the similar (if more tawdry) glossies on the checkout stand. It's possible to read their finger-wagging over the starlets and pop singers flaming out all over their pages as a kind of moralistic crusade against the dangers of any pleasure, or a chummy affirmation that for all the things we, the reading public, have done wrong to get us in a situation where we're waiting in the checkout line instead of paying a domestic servant to do it for us, at least we're not stumbling around Hollywood in a narcotic stupor, flashing what VH1 has decided to call "the va-jay-jay" at paparazzo.

You can also read all that coverage as a sort of class warfare, designed to warn the proles away from aspiring to the same wealth and fame as the people they're watching unravel.

Coverage about Internet-blunder wrecks that clip the wings of promising young interns at major New York brokerages share similar readings. When a local paper runs one, it's easy to read a sort of panicked consternation over the dangers of the Internet, which is just a stand-in for the panicked consternation people have been feeling about all manner of machines, technology or progress for a very long time. Then the stories fall into the hands of everyone besides the reporter, where they become an opportunity for us all to celebrate our own lack of the kind of ignorance, fecklessness and simple lameness that caused a brilliant young person's career to end in a spectacular fireball of third-hand wire service human interest rehashes and YouTube parodies.

As a kind of folklore, that mass outpouring of condemnation, schadenfreude and simple glee isn't hard to explain: Someone else got into a kind of trouble we could just as easily have gotten into ourselves if we made the mistake of being around a computer after a night on the town, so we push aside our fears by constructing a little lesson we can tell ourselves about how we'd surely never do anything so reckless as call our boss a mean name or air some dirty laundy from work. "Blaming the victim" has a certain, dubious pedagogical value.

It also gives Google, Facebook and every other entity interested in extracting as much of your information as possible a convenient device for deferring responsibility for what their users entrust to them:

"In a visit to the editorial board not long ago, a top Google lawyer made the often-heard claim that in the Internet age, people — especially young people — do not care about privacy the way they once did. It is a convenient argument for companies that make money compiling and selling personal data, but it's not true. Protests forced Facebook to modify Beacon and to ease its policies on deleting information. Push-back of this sort is becoming more common."

The thing is, there's always a catch-up period between something new coming along and people internalizing its benefits and dangers. It's way too early to know whether people don't care about privacy anymore, the same way it would be inappropriate to point to a number of people who fell victim to a heretofore undiscovered side effect of a prescription drug and sagely proclaim that people just don't care about being alive anymore.

I think the NYT columnist is wrong, though, if protests over Beacon are supposed to represent some nascent pro-privacy groundswell. People protested Beacon because it did something of immediate bad effect. Facebook retooled it and they all shut up, but they continue feeding information to the likes of Facebook, and Facebook continues to provide a lot more information than required. In other words, we haven't really seen the worst that could happen, nor have we seen an incident that demonstrates how extensive and interconnected all the information gathering is.

If, or when, it does happen, people like that Google lawyer will shrug and tell us we were all asking for it, anyhow.

(Link)