Privacy zealots have a big problem.
In order to get what they want, they need people to be afraid, but gulf between their Chicken-Little claims and the actual experiences of most Internet users grows wider by the day.
Their latest effort to salvage their ever-diminishing credibility comes in response to a seemingly innocuous Consumer Reports survey on the Facebook habits of American consumers.
While the survey contains some methodological problems and vague, leading questions, its general findings were pretty straightforward. The main takeaway seems to be that Americans use social networking tools to share information with one another.
If anything, the survey findings are mostly of the “water is wet” variety, but in the hands of professional privacy scolds like Jeff Chester and James Steyer, they become evidence of a vast, evil conspiracy that must be stopped. In an article about the findings on the Consumer Reports website Chester and Steyer turn the rhetoric dial to 11 in hopes of transforming a ho-hum poll into a smoking gun.
What’s interesting is the increasing level of cognitive dissonance between what these privacy zealots say, and what Internet users actually experience.
What’s interesting is the increasing level of cognitive dissonance between what these privacy zealots say, and what Internet users actually experience.
Hundreds of millions of people vote with their feet every day by sharing information on Facebook and thousands of other different online forums. People like the personalized and context-sensitive information and services that the Internet provides, and by and large have not experienced the host of holy horrors that Internet privacy extremists have been fortelling for over a decade.
Chester, Steyer and other professional privacy zealots would have you believe that those people are just too ignorant to understand what information sharing means. But I am willing to bet that the average Facebook user is far savvier than those hand-wringing nannies would ever give them credit for.
Frank Herbert, the author of the seminal sci-fi masterpiece Dune once said: “the people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.”
For the privacy zealots, that course of action couldn’t be clearer: scare people enough and maybe you can finally get the government to impose the direct control over the Internet you’ve always wanted.
The bad news for them – and the good news for the Internet – is that people don’t scare quite so easily.
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