Why are these corporations singing out loud about protecting our personal privacy? According to the website, “Data Privacy Day is an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information." More than dignity, this is about building trust with consumers so that these companies can do things with our personal data. Some of those are things we might like, a lot. Aggregate data analysis and personal recommendation could be the foundation of the next step of the internet. Unfortunately, Facebook's recent privacy policy changes put that future at risk by burning the trust of hundreds of millions of mainstream users.
Facebook's privacy changes were bad for two reasons: because they violated the trust of hundreds of millions of users, putting many of them at risk where they had felt safe before, and because by burning that trust in the first major social network online, the next generation of online innovation built on top of social network user data is put at risk.
How Facebook Changed
This past December, Facebook did an about-face on privacy. (Here's our extensive coverage of the changes and why they were made.) For years the company had based its core relationship with users on protecting their privacy, making sure the information they posted could only be viewed by trusted friends. 350 million people around the world signed up for that system.
