Facebook stole our secrets, but fools like me helped them
SOMETIMES you just have to hold your hands up and admit you got things wrong.
Mark Zuckerberg has been doing a lot of this lately as he faces tough questioning over Facebook’s data breach scandal.
But while there’s no doubt Zuckerberg and his team of superrich nerds are chiefly to blame for harvesting the personal details of almost 90 million users worldwide, the truth is that many of us also bear a degree of responsibility for what happened.
Me, personally, I have been a spectacular idiot. Without a moment’s thought, I gave Facebook access not only to my network of friends and acquaintances, private messages and pictures, political likes and dislikes — in fact, pretty much everything there is to know about me right down to my shoe size (42, since you ask).
I also unwittingly handed over some potentially sensitive personal information which, in the wrong hands, might have caused serious trouble, mainly in the form of contact details which, when I last checked, were still logged in Facebook’s bottomless memory bank.
If someone had broken into my home and stolen all this stuff, I would have been incandescent with rage.
BUT they didn’t need to. I offered it up willingly, if not entirely knowledgeably, through my lack of understanding about the way the internet — and companies that make their fortunes via it — work.
And that is not only incredibly naive of me, it’s also a dereliction of duty. Sure, Zuckerberg may have duped me; but let’s face it, I was rather asking for it.
I might as well have left the front door wide open and the family silver set out on the kitchen table for all the consideration I gave to the implications of sharing my life online when I joined Facebook in 2007. I just did it because everyone else was doing it — and besides, it seemed like a fun way to stay in touch with friends and family.
Of course, that was exactly what Facebook wanted us to think. And the reason most of us failed to spot the sleight of hand was because very few of us had the technical knowledge — or the nous — to see social media for what it has become: the ultimate Orwellian nightmare, Big Brother dressed up as a heart emoji and all the more sinister for it.
My generation, with one foot in the analogue past, the other in the digital future, could not possibly have envisioned the far-reaching consequences of the internet.
We were much as I imagine the poor tribes of South America must have been when they first encountered the Spanish Conquistadors: at once awestruck and amazed, blissfully — fatally — unaware of the potential for danger.
This is why we never predicted the rise of online porn or the scourge of cyberbullying, or the dissemination of extremist ideology — these things simply did not exist on such a scale in our universe. So why would it have ever occurred to us that geeky Zuckerberg would turn out not only to have facilitated one of the greatest heists of the 21st century, but also to have got us, the victims, to do all the work for him and leave the loot on his digital doorstep?
This is, as my husband is overly fond of saying, a ‘ teachable moment’. Because tempting as it would be to point the finger of blame at one man and his organisation, we must all accept our naivety in this scandal. unless we do, we will never learn.
And people like Zuckerberg will always get the better of us.