So Facebook settled with the FTC over privacy and Mark Zuckerberg wrote another apologetic blog post (as pointed out by Liz Gannes this is his tenth).  Part of the need for these apologies comes from Facebook’s aggressive approach to releasing features which at some level is admirable in a company of their scale.  But what is really driving the problems is a fundamental conundrum about privacy in the digital age.  Anything that was private a second ago can be made public by someone else with often little more than a click.  One click public-making if you so want.

There is no doubt that this extremely powerful technology will over time transform our conceptions of private and public.  I highly recommend Jeff Jarvis’s book Public Parts as it provides some interesting historical and cross cultural contexts.  What the book makes eminently clear is just how much “private” and “public” are social constructs and how fundamentally they have changed with past changes in technology.

These large scale social changes, however, tend to take much longer than the underlying technology changes that drive them. So we now find ourselves in an in-between period.  We have the one-click public-making technology but we still (mostly) have our previous notions of public and private.  Facebook started out by incorporating these previous notions deeply into the system but it is difficult if not impossible to get to the kind of clear lines that people are still looking for in a system of Facebook’s complexity (e.g., what is the privacy expectation around something shared with friends of friends?).

What has worked much better for people to date is to have easily understood conventions around the privacy expectations for completely separate types of communication.  If you text or IM a person your expectation is one of privacy.  That’s the primary reason a site such as bnter hasn’t taken off yet.  It goes fundamentally against the grain of people’s expectations of privacy for a particular type of communication. The same is largely true for email, which is why even smart people get caught in sending emails to reporters who then occasionally publish those as on the record conversations.  

When we have settled into whatever our new social constructs will be (and I don’t expect that to be anytime soon), the discussions we are having now will seem as quaint as the debates over whether newspapers could publish photographs.   I don’t know what exactly those new constructs will be, but I highly doubt that reflecting them in software will require users to make complex adjustments to privacy settings.