Privacy is Down; Get Over It, Will You!

If I had one social networking advice to give for 2012, this is it: privacy is down; get over it, will you!

The most common complaint or reason people mention to me about their hesitation in joining the social network world is lack of privacy.  In these people’s minds there is a clear privacy hole in this technology.  Some don’t want to share information about their lives or pictures.  Some are concerned about what people can do by stalking their profile.

What I can tell this people is: act according to your beliefs, but as interesting as your life may seem to you I can guarantee that 99.999999% of the world’s population is completely uninterested in it.  Your life is very likely less interesting to other people than you give it credit for.  And there will be hundreds of thousands of others who will make all they can to show everything, and I mean everything, to the social world audience, which makes it even less plausible people would be interested in our “boring” lives.

Even if someone end up looking at your profile, the behavior in the web shows they will move to the next one in a matter of seconds and will never remember you anyway.  And if you are concerned about serious stalkers or identity theft, it’s known that the vast majority of the offenders are people physically close to us, so you should be concerned about the real world not the virtual one.

The exception is children.  They really need to be protected because they can fall prey because they don’t have the maturity to deal with some sick people out there.  Even though, once again, the majority of the problems will unfortunately happen with people close to them and who they trust (also read The Strange Faces of Crime).

There are some reasons why the concept of privacy is changing so dramatically.  The people who created Facebook were teenagers when they did it.  They didn’t want privacy!  They wanted to be found!  Surprisingly the very nature of Facebook and social networks in general is to connect with people, to show off, to engage.  Not to hide!

The other reason is that there are few countries in the world where individual rights are really enforced.  So most of the world’s population was never used to have privacy anyway in the first place.

If you put these groups together you are going to get to the conclusion very few people really care about privacy after all.  Take a look at the half billion+ people putting information in Facebook.

So, trust me: if you are not a celebrity or politician, unless you post your social security number, salary, bank account and password in the social world, you will be safe.  And if you don’t believe me, try to became famous in the social world and let me know what did you have to do to make it happen.  I can guarantee posting about your life will not make it.

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Is Twitter Going Down?

In theory a great concept to simplify communication and collaboration. Just 140 characters each. You either have to know how to convey your message in a very concise way or don’t even start. This is Nirvana for all extremely busy people in the world.

However, the creators of Twitter underestimated the potential of humankind to explore it in a negative way. But let me start with the positive developments, which are many and may stick for good:

• It was never so simple to tag a subject and filter by it. Hash tags are just a great concept.
• It was never so fast to get a response for an issue or question. Post it and if you created a relevant network, you’ll have a good answer extremely quickly.
• Therapy was never so cheap. Just open yourself to the world. With so little time and few characters, your tweet will get lost so quickly it may never be seen by anyone.
• It was never so personal. People were amazed to start receiving celebrity tweets, directly from their hands and brains (questionable), at the exact time they were thinking about it. And in some cases, few lucky mortals would even receive a reply.
• It was never so easy to have conversations during a seminar and exchange ideas, without disrupting the presenter, creating an extremely valuable parallel set of knowledge. Better yet, without even being physically close to anyone. Twitter has become the official way to whisper during live events.

I’ve stayed away from Twitter for about a week for personal reasons. I may have missed some interesting things but there was never intent to try to catch up. Then, for some time I thought: why should I go back there? Should I just delete my accounts — yes, I have 3 for different purposes — and forget about it?

The reason I thought that way is because there is too much noise to be able to filter what is really relevant. And because of that, many people are actually giving up Twitter.

Like any new thing, there is euphoria and then accommodation. Twitter as well as Facebook and other social networking solutions are at the highest point of euphoria. What will start now is accommodation, where people who already learned the pros and cons of such capabilities will adjust behavior. This is when quality replaces quantity. Massive clean-up, filtering and focus on relevance will take place. Following multiple people will only occur if you don’t care about what they say. Machine-like spitting tweets will actually make you lose followers.

The answer is yes, microblogging in general is going down. Not completely though. Just to a level where quality returns. It’s past the time people could get away tweeting like actual thoughtless birds. While one bird singing at a distance is relaxing, a thousand angry birds chirping at your ears at the same time is definitely not fun!

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--- Vinicius da Costa is Associate Director, Collaboration and Social Media Solutions at Kraft Foods. This text represents his personal opinion and does not represent the views of Kraft Foods, Inc.