Privacy under Pressure

Friday night I had an interesting discussion regarding the future of privacy. My feeling was that peoples privacy in the web came under strong pressure the last five years, certainly due the success of social networks. Two days later I read a ReadWriteWeb article where Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg sees a shift in social norms that deprecates personal privacy in the web. This article will try an inquiry about how privacy came under pressure. First word to Mr. Zuckerberg:

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time […]

We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But […] what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it”

Zuckerberg talks about the perceived shift of social norms as an opportunity to innovate. Indeed Management Thinker Peter Drucker named Changes in public perception as one of seven sources of innovation.
Assuming Zuckerberg is right, how comes that we experience a shift in culture where privacy is valued less? If the social network is the reason we have to take a look at the actors involved in their social affair. I identify four roles in there:

1. The consuming viewer, who in his pure role only consumes the information created by self publishers. In reality processes the information and interchanges it with the publisher. He has no interest in privacy, as he wants to perceive as much as possible from the publishers output
   
   
2. The network owner, who provides the tools for interchange. She has a genuine interest in maximizing the networks value. Privacy is working against her value maximization endeavor.
   
   
3. Third party businesses. They want as much as information as they can get and are against privacy.
   
   
4. The self publishing person that creates information about herself. She gains value in feedback from peers. She can increase potential value by becoming a public persona. But has an interest in controlling who knows what about herself.
   

We have obviously a single role with interest in privacy and this role is not so sure about it anymore, maybe because:

1. Strong communicators showed how their value increases with giving away their data. More cautious People follow as they experience nothing awful happens.
   
   
2. People are more comfortable with internet in general. Old fears and power abuse fantasies are gone.
   
   
3. Privacy concerns exist, but many see the control in how you present yourself - not in whom you allow to view your profile
   

We have seen that social network privacy encounters strong interests against from all the network actors and since it decreases the benefit of everyone involved, its crisis is reasonable. Only to become again vital if a major abuse occurs.