The Great Debate

- 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.

– Kevin Prince is chief technology officer of Perimeter E-Security. The views expressed are his own. –

Social Networks have grown out of control. Literally. Today, neither users nor social networking companies can control the monsters they have created. Think Jurassic Park: where John Hammond wanted to build something no one else had ever done, a fun theme park combined with a zoo of cloned dinosaurs.  He built what he thought would be adequate security, but in reality, didn’t understand nearly enough about the environment he was trying to control.  People naturally trusted that proper security was in place and that they would of course be safe. Quickly things spiral out of control, and nearly everyone gets eaten by the end of the movie.

The creators of social networking sites — yes all of them — are just like John Hammond. Their unique ideas caught on in such a viral way that just keeping up with the bandwidth, processing power, storage, development, and everything else required to keep the system online is an amazingly complex, never-ending task. For most of these sites, security is – and has always been – an afterthought. Some of them try, but it’s a bit like closing the amusement park gates after the Tyrannosaurus has bolted.

— Linsey Fryatt is editor of stuff.tv. The views expressed are her own. –

It’s facebook’s fifth birthday this week. And while I love every status-updating, picture-tagging, friend-stalking pixel of it, I often wish it had never been invented.

Its obvious time-thievery and propensity to turn me into an obsessive page refresher, jonesing for my next next notification fix aside, I find Facey-B was the first step in a downward spiral (if spirals can have steps) to my entire life being played out online in some form or other. And I’m exhausted.