Top Trends of 2010: Privacy

The rise of Facebook as a truly mainstream social network was a big story this year. An interesting question is, how much of Facebook’s success was directly related to its loosening of privacy controls at the end of 2009? That move created both a backlash and a huge bump in users as 2010 unfolded.

The issue of privacy has come to the fore again this month, with the swirling controversy around WikiLeaks and previously secret government cables. From Facebook to WikiLeaks, Google Street View to an app called I Can Stalk U, 2010 has been a tumultuous year in online data privacy. Let’s look back at some of the major privacy stories of the year.

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Facebook’s Privacy Controls

In December 2009, Facebook announced a significant change to its privacy settings. Previously, most of a user’s information on Facebook was private by default. That was the guiding philosophy of Facebook when it launched in Harvard’s dorm rooms in 2004. In December, a large swath of the average Facebook user’s data was made public.

Your name, profile photo, gender, current city, networks, friends list, and all of the pages you subscribe to, became publicly available information on Facebook at the end of last year. Later, in May, Facebook reluctantly reversed some of those changes. While the default setting for most content published on Facebook remains public, control over a few key settings were shifted back into the hands of users.

Notably, the ability to hide your friends list and list of interest pages from the public.

According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, sharing information is the norm on the Internet nowadays and Facebook’s privacy changes were a response to this. "If people share more, the world will become more open and connected," he wrote in a guest article in the Washington Post. What he didn’t say is that open data is also easier to advertise against. So, many accused Facebook of abandoning its core principles in pursuit of profit.

Other, more "open" social networks have been created to provide an alternative to Facebook – the most promising being Disapora. However, at this stage the ‘open’ alternatives are a very minor threat to Facebook’s dominance in the social network market.

WikiLeaks

The most disruptive organization to privacy over 2010 has undoubtedly been WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website run by Australian Julian Assange. WikiLeaks has sought out and published hundreds of thousands of previously secret government documents. It has become a new form of media company, with its so-called "scientific journalism" model and quest for radical transparency in government operations.

WikiLeaks has created a sharp divide between those people who believe that governments need to be able to carry out important diplomatic work under a cloak of secrecy, and those people who believe that freedom of information extends to what governments are doing on their behalf. Critics have argued that WikiLeaks has endangered lives, for example U.S. citizens fighting in Iraq. Proponents of WikiLeaks have argued that the system of secrecy needs to be disrupted in this manner, in order for true democracy to prevail.

WikiLeaks is nothing if not a product of its era. As our own Curt Hopkins summarized this month, "WikiLeaks, the site and the group behind it, could not have happened until the social web did. Leaks have happened for decades but the penetration and the mass of documents only became possible recently. Websites, email, wikis, blogs, microblogs and social networks created a network of avenues for leaks to come in and to spread out again."

Next Page: Google’s privacy woes, the dangers of Location Apps, and more…

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