Perceptions of Privacy: Social Networking, Twenty-Somethings and Employment

As I wrote yesterday, the social networking site, Facebook has integrated a news feed into their user interface. The feed aggregates information about my friends and posts it in a central location on my dashboard page.

I personally like the feed. I enjoy seeing what my friends are up to. But there are nearly 180,000 more than 278,000 Facebook members who disagree with me. They’ve formed a group to protest the inclusion of the news feed. They feel that their privacy has been violated.

All this hullabaloo led me to revisit my previous statements about how people my age use the social Web. I’ve concluded that I grossly overestimated my cohorts when I wrote that “for people who grew up in the computer age, the social Web is our frat house bulletin board. It’s a pervasive part of our tech-savvy culture, and its not necessarily a bad thing.”

My longtime friend Emmett Shear co-founder of the now defunct recently sold Kiko calendar project observed that in this Web-based world privacy is no longer a black and white phenomenon, it exists on a continuum determined by how easy information is to access.

Yes Emmett, it’s true that Facebook has unilaterally altered the privacy bargain by changing the way that information is presented. But they’ve also included a feature that allows users to keep any information they deem private from being aggregated into the feed. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be using that feature–even the people who are vehemently protesting the “creepiness” of Facebook.

In fact, even people who claim to care about privacy don’t use features designed to protect it. According to a recent Newsweek article on social networking–only 17% of Facebook users ever change their privacy settings beyond the default that makes everything they say and do available to everyone in their networks. It’s like they believe that they don’t have to work or think critically in order to make Facebook function the way they want it to.

The problem here isn’t with what twenty-somethings do with their Saturday nights, it’s their ignorance of the format they use to broadcast their antics. As a professional in an increasingly Web-based world, I’m not sure that I’d want to work with someone who is too lazy to change his own privacy settings or who can’t grasp that the Web isn’t private, even in a walled garden like Facebook.

We’ll be talking more about the public-private debate as it relates to human resources best practices at the upcoming Blog Business Summit this October.