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Designing privacy
Facebook Trust Transparency and Control Labs is teaching designers and startups to care about individual privacy.
User beware, you live in interesting times.
The internet has transformed our everyday life profoundly. Technology is moving fast. We embraced the transformation it brought to our lives with open arms and got bitten in the ass for it. We adopted this new technology quickly, without considering the possible repercussions on our privacy.
In the early stages of the web 2.0, and with the emergence of social networks platforms like Facebook and Instagram or free services like Gmail, we handed a lot of information about ourselves, without understanding what we were giving away, to whom and what these new corporations were doing with it. We made the honest mistake to trust them with our data. Never in a million years did we believe that they were going to use that data to make money, to sell it to third parties or to use it to manipulate us. Moreover, we were sharing a lot of personal pieces of information in our blog posts, Facebook statuses, and tweets because, at that time, the internet seemed like a safe place to express yourself. We didn’t realize how valuable the information we were propagating online was.
However, with the maturity of the internet, our awareness grew with it. Some of us learned the best practices about online privacy organically by educating ourselves to the new usages of the web. Others learned the hard way, in the wake of scandals like Cambridge Analytica. We entered an age of loss of innocence, and regulators started to think about how to supervise the use of our private data.
I want to believe that it is a positive thing that governments are creating laws like the GRPD to protect us from abuse from corporations. I want to believe that there is no another hidden agenda behind it. I try to leave my tinfoil hat at the front door, the one that makes me fear that those privacy laws are, in fact, limiting our freedom instead of protecting it. It is partially for that reason that I think we should not rely solely on the Law, and that we should educate ourselves, to protect us from wrongdoing.
