Privacy, social media, and Google

Sometimes we keep our social profiles separate for very valid reasons and social media platforms—or technology companies—shouldn’t circumvent those efforts as a means of upping their own social capital value or out of some need to be more “socially-connected.”

What I post and the reasons behind what I post to Twitter are entirely different than what I post to Facebook. What I post to this blog is not always something that I would write about for the paper. Why? Because I have different audiences on every platform and frankly, I have a need for some level of privacy in what has become a very public world. What a novel idea.

Privacy on many of these sites continues to be a point of discussion. Whether it’s utilizing a secured url for login pages on Facebook or Twitter or having the ability to turn off the friendly little cookies that allow you to comment via your Facebook page about articles, videos, and whatever other schlock you might be looking at, privacy is important. People don’t like their information being rifled through—no matter what’s its being used for or not being used for.

Google is the latest to initiate a new “social feature” without being upfront. I run a search on Google this evening and guess what pops up?

When signed into Google, the platform automatically searches for public profiles on social networks that might match yours and it does this without asking your permission to do so first. Doesn’t this sound a little bit like the passive privacy adjustments Facebook’s been crucified for in the past? My Twitter profile is public at this point, but I make a point of privatizing other profiles that I have for the purpose of filtering audiences. I’ve made a point of disallowing Google to keep track of my search history. I’ve now made a point of barring Google from searching for profiles to “connect” to my Google account. I did these things to maintain that minuscule level of privacy that I’d like to keep without having to completely take everything down. 

This isn’t really so much about Google, though. This is about the fact that the concept of privacy has gone away. Not only is it not given most of the time, but increasingly it’s assumed that no one really wants any privacy. We know that we’ve given you our information. We’ve utilized the tools you’ve given us to keep confidential what we deem necessary. How dare you thumb your nose at us in order to get what you want. What happened to personal and professional ethics?