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Emily, I can't reconcile the conflict your freshly minted Generation Y (is it Gen Z now?) has embraced of eschewing privacy, which you all seem happy to do, yet expecting, even demanding as you wrote, "complete control over the private information we make public." The uncomfortable truth is you can never remove all traces of the past. That said, your general forthrightness and candor about your own lives shows a trust and wonder missing during my cohort's coming of age. My pre-alphabet age group of former flower children thought ourselves bold and experimental, but we only flirted with the openness and lovely acceptance members of your on-beyond-zebra generation typically show one another. Each of you inhabits her own skin so comfortably and displays such cheerful self-confidence, it does your elders proud. We third- and fourth-wave Facebook users now crowding your playground are grateful for your gracious reception, but Emily, you are also at the age when you come to realize we can't control what people know about us. We live in a public environment and people like to observe one another. You can't hold a megaphone and then tell people not to listen, nor take pictures of yourselves, post them, and expect the images to remain unseen. Despite the harsh trade-off, I say, go for it. Create as many online personae as you wish to, express yourselves honestly and sincerely, and enjoy the marvelous digital era you were lucky to be born into. Although you do not control who sees what you post nor what they do with it, remember, you will always have absolute power over what you say next.
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A guest post from Slate intern Emily Lowe:
Bonnie, your take on the Facebook information uproar is interesting, though I wonder if you're overlooking a key part of the issue: that most Facebook users don't actually care about privacy. As a longtime Facebook user (I joined in 2005, back when membership was still limited to college students), I have to say that I don't think privacy was ever a big concern for the first (or second, or third) wave of Facebook users. During a lecture I attended given by Harvey Rishikof, the national security expert suggested that my generation is the first group of Americans that puts almost no value on our privacy, and I tend to believe it.
Starting with the ancient AOL member profile and extending now into the detailed personal information sections on sites like Facebook and MySpace, the concept of publicizing private information on the Web has always seemed natural for the cybergeneration. We see that with personal blogs, too: People will put all kinds of detailed information about themselves and their lives on the Internet without much thought for the safety or security of doing so. There has been controversy about Facebook's privacy standards before, and it never seemed to cause this much of a stir. Even the rumblings in early February about Zuckerberg's intent to sell off personal information on the site as the biggest microtargeting tool ever didn't garner as much attention as the Consumerist article (which was met with enough protest to make Zuckerberg change his mind).
So why are Facebook users suddenly worried about the security of their information? In part, I think it's because Facebook isn't just for co-eds anymore; people of all ages are jumping on social networks now, and with them come their concerns about free and open information-sharing. But I also think the issue is not one of privacy but of control. While my generation may not mind broadcasting intimate details and photos, we've always felt we had complete control over the private information we make public. The sudden realization that we might not have the power to remove all traces of ourselves from our electronic playground is what is giving users the heebie-jeebies. It's that lack of power, not privacy, that's making these information exhibitionists suddenly try to cover up.
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