A Private Matter

When "Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over," a rhetorician can't help but notice the hyperbole. Certainly, at a time when even the New York Times covers the fact that "Critics Say Google Invades Privacy" with Google Buzz, which at one time defaulted to revealing a person's e-mail contacts to the world, there is no doubt that social computing technologies are likely to make more forms of communication and interaction public than ever before. Coming relatively soon after Google's Eric Schmidt argued that "if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Zuckerberg's assertions that "we've decided that these would be the social norms now" and that a "lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built" seem to indicate that privacy changes are corporate driven rather than engineered by the public at large.