Privacy seems to be something that a lot of individuals are worried about, but organizations seem to have no care for their constituents to have it. Facebook and Google lure users into their services with promises of secure communication and access to some special attribute that only that service can offer. With Buzz, Google violated the trust that users had placed in them, but of course, this was not the first time. Google has always had somewhat shady policies regarding information storage and use. With Google, there is an expectation of privacy on the part of the user, but an expectation of complete ownership of all information that passes through its network on the part of Google themselves. These are perhaps conflicting expectations. Facebook on the other hand, is just badly designed. There is now an open-door policy on a service that was once a protected place for university students to communicate with each other and for friends who went to different schools to stay in contact with each other. Now, there is a creepy factor since things have been opened up to allow any strange person in the world to sign up. It is a bit concerning, especially for anyone who may have had an account when the service was safe, and has since abandoned it. At this point Facebook is just careless, allowing any and all types of applications access to their API and making simple mistakes that cause email notifications to be mis-delivered, which is a severe breach of privacy. Twitter, on the other hand, is a gaping privacy hole, but that’s perfectly fine, since Twitter users have absolutely no expectation of privacy.

I personally do not have much worry about privacy, because in general I don’t really have anything to hide, but I do not like the idea of my information being released without my consent. I do not want to be added to services that I have not signed up for, and I especially do not want things that I write or create to become the property of Google, it just isn’t right.