Privacy and Social Media

From every angle, social media is anathema to privacy. The very founding concept of paleolithic AOL chatrooms and Usenet newsgroups, and later Facebook, MySpace, and the earliest blogging sites was to provide a forum for people to share with each other. People shared ideas, humor, emotions, preferences, prejudices, priorities, and often misguided attempts at profundity. Newer sites simply broadened and deepened the sharing – Twitter users share commute times and coffee temperatures, Tumblers share memes galore, and Instagramites share a wealth of doctored photographs. 
We learned things about the people in our world, and they about us. Thanks to social media, we now know that if our nearest coworker were a tree, she would be a willow, and the celebrity she believes that she most resembles is Angelina Jolie. We also know that Shirley’s kids are honor students and that Tom’s brother was just released from prison (early, for good behavior), that Jeffrey lives and dies with his Eagles and that Sandra is so, so, so sad at the plight of shelter animals. Importantly, we know when people are leaving town and how long they will be gone. We know if they come into money. We learn about their families and their vulnerabilities. We learn about drinking and drug use, sexual promiscuity, and even crimes like DWI or hit and run. We see pictures of their kids, their cars, their vacations, and their homes. 
All of this sharing may help create communities, but it also destroys privacy. The bikini-clad body that is perfectly appropriate on the beach at St. John or Captiva may undermine the respect an employee has worked hard to earn from superiors, subordinates, and peers at the office who may view the vacation pictures on Facebook. The same may be true for pictures of a drinking party among friends. Too much published information can and will present obstacles when circumstances change and a spouse sues for divorce, or a rival is seeking an edge for a promotion at work. We all know that kids can be the cruel, and your insistence on wearing mouse ears at a Disney theme park may reach the attention of your children’s classmates, and their parents. Criminals trawl social media constantly, looking for vulnerabilities and vacations, pinpointing easy targets. 
Operators of various social media outlets are well aware that their profits may increase as we expand our willingness to share personal information about ourselves, and much of the business model development for social media sites is designed to coerce, cajole, trick, taunt, or tease us into revealing more information about our lives and our thoughts and opinions. Who are your friends? What discounts interest you? You “liked” the last Vin Diesel movie, will you like the next one? What is your relationship status? Who do you write to? Who do you poke? Won’t you download the mobile app so we can see where you are when you access our site? Your friends have downloaded our app. Why won’t you? We will ask you again in two hours. 
Every bit of information we disclose is another databite to be mined and measured, sorted and sold. Online transactions provide even more opportunities, because a purchase through a social media site hits the trifecta for the site owner. With a purchase, the site registers our activity, our expenditure, our degree of interest in a good or service and an entire category of goods or services (opening our wallet demonstrates significant interest), our bank, our credit card information, our shipping address, our online ID, and our passwords. In addition, the social media site may trumpet the sale to our friends attempting to induce additional transactions. And beyond this extraordinary information bounty, the social media site likely received a financial kickback from a sale made from its platform. Moreover, the data mining industry attempts to review every transaction and every posting in which we engage in order to be able to maximize the profit potential of every piece of information disclosed by that transaction or posting. 
For this reason, social media is not simply a collection of online places that allow private information to escape, but social media sites are organized to draw as much participation and information out of us as possible. Like casinos built without sunlight or clocks so as to encourage your further play, the social media sites and data mining industry study online behavior and build manipulation machines designed to entice you to remain engaged and to divulge information. A search engine site may not care whether you own a particular make or model of car or that you baked cookies last night, but it cares that you told them about your car and your cookies. They make money from aggregating car owners and cookie bakers and selling information to companies who can exploit that information. 
Until recently, there has been very little counterbalance to the siren’s call of revealing everything on social media or to the tricks and manipulations that the online media companies employ to make sharing easy, satisfying, and seemingly so necessary. Certainly there are authors writing jeremiads both in and out of the mainstream media who will despair about the morality of kids today, or about the solip