Facebook users' privacy outlook: 'Crisis? What crisis?'
In response to the recent uproar in the United States and abroad overFacebook's ever-evolving user privacy standards— which have now swelled to exceed the length of the U.S. Constitution — executives at the social-media company have called for an all-hands "crisis meeting"on privacy issues.
As reported by Benny Evangelista and Alejandro Martinez-Cabrera intoday's San Francisco Chronicle, a number of Internet moguls have abandoned the site in disgust. Blog entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, for example, recently wrote that Facebook is "out" among his Silicon Valley brethren because the company is "not trustworthy" in their view.
And Facebook probably isn't going to win back much of that trust in the wake of a transcript of IM messages from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg published in Business Insider. The messages, which date from the site's launch from the 19-year-old Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room, refer to the first wave of users as "dumb f**ks" for trusting him with their personal information. "If you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask," he told his chat partner; he had, he reported, "over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses" and Social Security numbers.
However, Evangelista and Martinez-Cabrera say that the flight from Facebook is still only at a trickle, among an elite cadre of geek users. Josh Levy, a social-media enthusiast, recently launched a site to persuade 10,000 users to kill their Facebook accounts in protest over the recent shifts in privacy policy — but just 100 have offered to join him so far.
Perhaps, that's because frequent Internet users are lulled into a false sense of security by a heightened feeling of well-being. Time magazine writer Tara Kelly reports that results from a British research team suggest a direct link between Internet usage and overall happiness — with female users picking up a stronger buzz of delight from the experience than their male counterparts do. With the overall move of the Web into sharing-themed social media, the pull of sites like Facebook is especially strong among women users in societies that rely on more traditional gender roles. As Kelly writes:
Although the report didn't explore why women reap more happiness from Internet access than men do, the report hypothesizes that because women tend to be at the center of their family's social network, the Web is a tool to help them keep their home lives organized. According to the Brookings Institution's Graham, while the findings may surprise initially, they do make sense. "Particularly the [results on] gender and lesser developing countries, if you consider that women in many of these contexts are either isolated or repressed in a way," she says. "IT gives them communication with the outside world, access to networks and so on.
If Facebook and the Web in general are indeed making people happy, this trend will likely be first noticed by — you guessed it — Facebook. Using the data submitted by users in status updates, the company's data-science team has created a "Gross National Happiness Index" that measures the mood of its hundreds of millions of users. But there's no guarantee, of course, that evidence of your happiness might not be marketed somewhere else online.
— Brett Michael Dykes is a national affairs writer for Yahoo! News.
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