My prediction on World Privacy Day -- that it was "only a matter of time before there is a public earthquake over" the "Growing Privacy-Publicacy Fault-line" -- came true in less than a month.
- Facebook's recent publicacy changes to their terms of service led to a quick consumer "earthquake" over who owns their private information online -- an earthquake that was triggered by a strategic blast from the Consumerist blog.
- In a matter of days, Facebook reversed its publicacy changes to its terms of service, restoring them to their previous state.
Anyone that thinks this is an isolated incident, simply does not understand the powerful underlying tectonic dynamic here -- that there is growing tension on the privacy-publicacy fault-line.
- As Facebook learned, users have strong expectations that they own and should control their own private information.
- This is in direct tension with publicacy interests and business models that increasingly seek to exploit/arbitrage technology's capability to make previously-private information -- public.
- The recession and the change in Administrations, only add force to this publicacy tension.
If the world's largest publicacy business models, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, and others, think that there will not be more public earthquakes like the Facebook publicacy earthquake -- they are in serious denial.
As I explained in my first post in this ongoing privacy-publicacy fault-line series: "the mega-trends of collective intelligence, digitization of records, cloud computing, privacy misdirection, search personalization, location-driven search, and others are all adding pressure to the privacy/publicacy fault-line."
Expect more and bigger public earthquakes, if publicacy interests and business models do not get more responsible about safeguarding and respecting users privacy online.
