Credit: NY Times

There’s an old joke: “What happens in Vegas stays on Facebook.” It causes most of my generation (boomers) to chuckle, because it feels like there’s a grain of truth in the humour. Facebook causes us to get our privacy hackles up in a big way.

Boomers worry about privacy. We were taught on our mother’s knees not to talk to strangers, or talk politics or religion in polite company. Displaying photos of ourselves acting as miscreants is simply beyond the pale. As a result, Facebook scares the bejeebers out of most of us.

We often react by either locking down our profiles to within an inch of their lives (essentially creating anti-social media profiles), or just avoiding the whole mess by not participating.

There is, as Bill Clinton used to say, a “third way”. Just accept the whole darn thing is a very public, on-the-record soapbox and conduct yourself accordingly. If you wouldn’t say it or do it on the nightly news, don’t do it on Facebook.

As Robert Scoble, famed blogger and tech evangelist, wrote on his Facebook page:

“How do I handle the privacy issues Facebook is having? I changed all my settings to ‘as public as possible.’ That solved a few things. 1. It made it easy to figure out the privacy settings. 2. I won’t be shocked if something leaks into public view because now I’ll expect it. 3. It lets me move on with my life and make …fun of all those wacky pundits who deleted their Facebook accounts.”

Bravo!

Robert Hallcock put it succinctly in his article “Take control: 10 steps to maximizing your privacy on Facebook” on icrontic.com:

“Facebook’s profits are built on the backs of advertising and demographics data, both of which are more effective with a greater amount of public information. Knowing this, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have waged a calculated campaign to fatten their bottom dollar by slowly publicizing an ever-larger chunk of your profile.”

Which brings us to, whose fault is this anyway? Is it Facebook’s fault? According to Farhad Manjoo’s article in Fast Company, it is our own:

“The real problem may be far less easy to write off in 140 characters: It’s all our fault … we don’t give a flying tweet about privacy. If we did, why are we willingly geotagging photos, telling friends when we’re at our favorite restaurant, and revealing so many other once-private details of our lives?”

Facebook’s head PR guy Elliot Schrage did a Q&A this week with the New York Times. In it he stated, “My biggest concern reading these comments has been the incorrect perception that we don’t care about user privacy or that we’ll sacrifice user privacy in exchange for advertising. That’s just not true. We want to be trusted partners with our users in helping manage those tensions.”

Users seem to think we are the customers. We are not. We are the product in this scenario, hence the tension Schrage refers to.

As Manjoo puts it:

“The lesson here is striking: Control matters. Privacy doesn’t. And as long as we’re secure in the knowledge that whatever cool, new Web toy can be turned off, we’re fine letting the world peer deeper and deeper into our lives.”

As usual, send me your feedback on Twitter at @dblacombe or via e-mail doug@communicatto.com.

Doug Lacombe is president of communicatto.com, a social media marketing agency.

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