- Michael Fertik is the CEO and Founder of ReputationDefender, the online privacy and reputation company. The views expressed are his own. -
Facebook already knows a massive amount about you. They know your age, what you look like, what you like, what you do for fun, where you go, what you eat, whom you know, whom you know well, whom you sleep with, who your best friends and family are, and, again, how old they are, what they like, and so on.
On top of that, Facebook has a well-known history of privacy breaches or at least snafus. Publicly they seem committed to the notion that privacy is dead. Their CEO and Founder has said as much.
Never mind that this view is not shared by the public, which is hungry for privacy in the digital age. And never mind that the “death of privacy” would serve exactly the interests of a digital media company. It seems that it may be an honestly held belief among top leadership of Facebook that privacy is and should be dead.
Now, Facebook is expanding its reach even further. It will be rolling out a unified, cross-platform messaging system that will combine features of email, SMS, and chat. The company will offer users @facebook.com email addresses. At first blush, there’s nothing altogether new about the development from a technical standpoint. Unified messaging has been a goal since the advent of disunified messaging—more or less since SMS, IM, and chat became comparably popular and used in parallel.
