The reality is that when it comes to privacy, the trade-off has already been made: We decided long ago to give away our personal information in exchange for free content and the ability to interact seamlessly with others.
With the latest disclosure about Facebook’s data missteps — that the personal information of some 87 million users had been improperly harvested and shared with a British analytics firm — politicians can scream about privacy, and they should. But the public has proved over and over again that it doesn’t care.
After just about every big privacy hack over the past decade, people returned to the same store or online site that had been compromised. There were large breaches at Home Depot, Target and Yahoo, and the number of consumers who never went back is minuscule.
Perhaps Facebook’s latest privacy scandal will be a turning point. But the incentive for companies to protect our data — with the exception of financial firms — just isn’t there.
Benjamin Dean, the president of Iconoclast Tech, a consulting firm, has studied some of the biggest data hacks, poring over companies’ financial records before and after a breach. «The actual expenses from the recent and high-profile breaches at Sony, Target and Home Depot amount to less than 1 percent of each company’s annual revenues,» he wrote in a 2015 article.
When Google first introduced Gmail in 2004, this newspaper raised questions about the prospect of users objecting to a service that displayed advertising based on the content of their email. Now more than 1.2 billion people have active accounts with Gmail, a service that until the end of last year sifted through their private messages.
For consumers, the transaction has always been pretty clear: The convenience of free service in exchange for information that allowed advertisers to specifically target us. But we figured our data was being used by benign companies seeking to sell us that pair of sneakers we wanted, not by bad actors trying to influence our votes or incite violence in places like in Myanmar.
Mr. Zuckerberg has been apologizing for years for all sorts of breaches of trust with his «community.» But after each mea culpa, the Facebook community has grown.
Still, it is unusual for most consumers to truly feel the effects of a massive data breach. The people who have had money stolen or whose email was exposed are a statistical anomaly. Amy Pascal, the former top film executive at Sony Pictures, has an authentic claim to being a victim of a data breach; she suffered national embarrassment when her emails were revealed, and she later lost her job. But most people don’t feel it.
I recently asked users on Twitter whether they had deleted their Facebook accounts or reduced their activity on it. Nearly 700 users replied. For every one saying they were spurning Facebook, there were more saying they were continuing to use it.
«Understand nothing in social media is truly private and recognize that in most areas of life someone is trying to sell you something or affect your behavior,» one user wrote.
And while a number of people said they were distancing themselves from Facebook, they cited not only privacy concerns but said the service had become less relevant to them.
Back in 2010, Mr. Zuckerberg said: «People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information — and different kinds — but more openly with more people,» he said. «And that social norm is just something that’s evolved over time. And we view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and updating what our system is, to reflect what the current social norms are.»
Unless our social norms change, Facebook and other sites probably won’t, either.
After every big hack, users keep coming back.