Facebook, a gigantic Internet company, found itself in trouble when privacy regulators castigated it for making its users’ personal information available online.
People now begin to fear that their online privacy might be infringed upon by the Internet industry. In fact, the industry’s participants are competing with each other so fiercely that they are doing whatever it takes to get the upper hand in today’s market, especially when it comes to data collecting. This phenomenon has forced governments to come up with stricter measures in order to secure people’s online privacy.
The industry has its own excuses. It repeatedly points out that it has done quite a lot to guarantee its users the protection of their online privacy. According to Facebook, most users are satisfied with the services offered and the level of their online privacy. The problem is just that the media is arousing a commotion to grab people’s attention, a common example of media hysteria.
The privacy regulators’ censorship of Facebook is indeed too extreme. Facebook users may choose to leave the service at free will, since the social network services (SNS) market is hardly a monopoly. Moreover, regulating the Internet industry to secure online privacy is not a clever idea. An oppressive business environment is likely to suppress innovation, and it will result in preventing entrepreneurs from inventing creative business models.
Still, we cannot dismiss the online privacy issue simply because imposing regulations might result in a less stimulating business atmosphere. Social networks services including Facebook are expanding at an extremely rapid rate nowadays. These services have a strong incentive to reveal more information about their users, since they gain profit from demographically targeted advertisements.
Thus, in order to deal with this issue on the fundamental level, we should form a new assumption. The Internet industry takes it for granted that people decide to share their personal information when they join the services. However, that is not the case. Rather, the industry should allow its users to loosen privacy controls only if they want to. If Facebook fails to do this, this controversy will inevitably lead it to its decline someday.
