Everyone is Watching…

Some time ago I wrote in this space about a young Facebook user who got into trouble by posting pictures of himself at a costume party wearing a “convict” costume and drinking beer while awaiting sentencing on a DUI charge. It really didn’t help matters that his attorney had described the fellow’s drunken driving as an isolated incident, or that the offender himself had claimed to be very sorry for his actions and promised not to act that way again. It probably didn’t help that the defendant was below the legal drinking age, either. Instead of the wrist-slap he’d been hoping for, this jovial fellow wound up with serious jail time and other sanctions – all because he couldn’t be bothered to keep clean, stay out of trouble, and (most importantly) NOT have pictures of himself repeating his previous offenses splattered all over the Internet…

As bad as that was, there’s a story from New Zealand this week that tops it easily. It seems that an employee of their Social Development Ministry was fired, and has subsequently lost a wrongful termination action, as the result of posting descriptions of herself as “a very expensive paperweight” and similar comments on her Facebook page. You can find the original story from the Dominion Post by way of the Stuff.co.nz website linked here, but the upshot of the story is that after fraying her employer’s trust rather severely being charged and convicted of arson, the employee in question was then terminated for describing herself as the stereotype of a useless government drone. Under the circumstances, I suppose, we have to question if this self- report wasn’t, in fact, correct…

A much more immediate question would appear to be why otherwise sane people – some of them apparently partially educated! – go around believing that their Internet exploits will never be seen by anyone except their friends. This kind of behavior would be sufficiently asinine if they’d had their accounts set for full privacy (and the incriminating posts were leaked by gabby friends or careless acquaintances, but in both of these cases (and dozens of others that have popped up on the news in the last few years) the Facebook users in question hadn’t even bothered with the privacy settings, and just left everything on the defaults…

Now, no one is saying that Facebook users (or anyone else) shouldn’t have the right to freedom of individual expression, or that you shouldn’t be able to post any content you like (provided that neither the content nor whatever you had to do in order to get it violate any existing laws) to the Internet. What continues to bewilder me is why anyone thinks that anything you post online has any expectation of privacy. Even if Facebook had a perfect track record with privacy and data security (and they don’t; confusing and constantly changing privacy settings have been among the most frequent complaints about the company in recent years) there’s still no way they could possibly guarantee that you account couldn’t be hacked, cracked, or stolen – and your incriminating comments and/or pictures revealed to people who mean you no good…

It’s possible that as technology continues to evolve there may someday be privacy on the Internet, but I rather doubt it. I suspect that in much the same way that people have grown wary of leaving their doors unlocked or giving out their telephone numbers, people will just grow accustomed to the idea that anytime you’re online you are, in effect, standing on a lighted stage with everybody in the world who wants to bother tuning in watching you from out in the darkness. If that idea bothers you, there’s a simple solution: don’t post things online that you wouldn’t be comfortable accepting responsibility for in open court…

And whatever you do, never start a blog…