Slowly Warming Water

For those of you not paying attention, August is the first stretch of seven days in a long time that Facebook hasn’t been involved in some sort of privacy scandal.

It seems like every few minutes, a news story comes out. Too many people have your details. The site was hacked. Playing applications reduces work productivity. Future workplaces skim your profile for pictures of inappropriate behavior. By the time the story drops that Mark Zuckerberg once stole a baby panda’s ice cream just to watch it cry, I really won’t be too surprised.

The bottom line is that I’ve really stopped caring at this point. My more alarmist friends say this is exactly the problem. Facebook – social networking site and, apparently, secret shadow government – has me right where it wants me now.

My friends put it this way. They claim that the easiest way to kill a frog is to put it in a bathtub and slowly heat the water. This concerns me because, a) It suggests people have actively invested effort into how to kill frogs – one of the world’s least threatening creatures. And, b) It suggests my friends have personally tested this.

The idea (beyond the creepy analogy) is that people will get used to anything if they’re exposed to it slowly. Do you use Facebook? Have you used it for more than three years? Well, if the conspiracy theories are to be believed, you’re in the middle of a very warm tub of water.

I actually see why people say this. After all, my friends still talk about what they were doing when they instituted the feeds to show your friends every trivial activity you did on the site. Believe me. If JFK had been shot later that day, it would have been the second story on the evening news.

More recently, the site creator said his users were idiots for trusting him with our personal details – something far more outraging – and I barely heard about it.

But I don’t think people are getting complacent. They probably just don’t care. I mean, does Facebook really know enough about you to be dangerous? Sure, it has your name and school, but that’s public knowledge. Even if criminals got my social security number, my credit is probably lousy. What are they going to do with my personal information – be declined for credit cards?

And consider this. The Internet was never designed to keep secrets. As far as hiding places go, it’s about as bad as engraving your personal details on the surface of the moon. If you wanted your information hidden, why put it on the most visible place imaginable?

Your details – and that picture from college of you kissing that “girl” with the really big hands at a party – are as accessible as you want to make them.

In the meanwhile, I say we just sit back and enjoy the ride. Join a few groups. Add a few people from countries you’ve never heard of. And if you get a minute, try to work on a replacement for that old “frog-boiling” story. We really need a better analogy for that one.