Facebook. A nifty site where you can give your personal information and store it in some publicly accessible servers. It is generally thought of as a positive thing.
Wikileaks. A project that shares information that is meant to be secret. Military secrets, political affairs, boring reports. Often thought of as a negative thing.
The difference between them? One is mostly input (you give information to it), the other output (you get information from it). But privacy is not the main concern of most people. If it were, Facebook would be an abandoned desert wasteland similar to Orkut. It is consent that makes Wikileaks worse than Facebook. Wikileaks shares information that was originated by people who do not want it to be public, often obtained by shady means. Facebook shares information that people have given it willingly for the sole purpose of letting other people know something. Yet Facebook is the thing that has influence on us directly. It is what potential employers can check to get an impression of you, it is what new acquaintances see and make judgments by, it is what your parents might stumble upon, it is a place where you can be bullied publicly. It does that because we want it to.
Sure, one might argue that Facebook is pretty much obligatory, because how else could you stalk/keep up with people from around the world? The continuing success is caused by previous success. With the rise of FB-chat, the much-beloved Windows Live Messenger network has suffered the loss of many users, thus bringing about the annihilation of the protocol. By that I do not mean the basic IM-protocol (that allows you to chat), I mean the Messenger-specific protocol that allows IM communication through Microsoft's servers in the manner it has worked for so long. Instead, we now (or starting from April 8) we are stuck with a closed protocol (Skype-specific), which is not supported by most freeware IM clients (Miranda, GAIM and Kopete to name a few). To make matters worse, there is not a single IM client for Windows Mobile (a Microsoft product!) that would support Skype (an another Microsoft product!). There used to, but it was pulled due to some issues. Back on the subject, these changes in protocols and products cause people to jump ship and use alternatives, one of which is Facebook. And that is where the vicious circle appears: to be able to communicate with people from around the world, you need to use Facebook, because the people from around the world use Facebook to communicate with other people from around the world who use... you get the point. To leave would be to leave behind numerous contacts, because while you might have other available communication channels, you will hardly keep up with all of your friends without a live feed. It would be cumbersome and time-consuming. And at some point you will forget to check up on how a certain German-speaking ping-pong player from Russia or some pizza-loving Portuguese guy is doing. You will drift apart. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, is very difficult to assess. So it is generally thought of as an experiment better not done on yourself and your friends. And thus Facebook will continue to have active users.
Wikileaks, on the other hand, relies on information obtained from and sorted by a handful of individuals. Resources are scarce, which is why it is less heard of than some anonymous hackers, who remain active despite the efforts of law enforcement officials. Because they are anonymous, anyone can join them unofficially, which makes taking down the original group even more difficult than it already is. Wikileaks is not anonymous, because secrets generally have few people involved in them. It's why they are secrets - they are not shared with others. So if there are ten or so people who know a secret, and it becomes public, then it is certain that one of those people shared it whether knowingly or not. But the pool of suspects is extremely limited. If two secrets come out, the suspect pool shrinks considerably. And with the leak of the first secret, all of the people entrusted with the secret will be under heavy surveillance, many possibly (and likely) interrogated, etc. Internal Affairs will drill until they either find the leak or a scapegoat. Either way, getting caught is highly probable, which is why not a lot of people volunteer to give out classified information. And that means a drought of information for Wikileaks. The less informants they have, the less more are willing to turn in evidence, because while two informants can cover for each other, a single informant must stand along. Thus, it lingers between life and death, struggling to survive. Those random anonymous hackers however don't appear to be going away any time soon.
Secrets are difficult to keep, but in some circumstances even more difficult to share. Secrets are but information that you are prohibited from sharing with others. If the information is indeed shared, it's betrayal, a negative action. But if you can coerce people to share personal information about themselves, then you can use it however you wish, and the people will be glad of it. Because they have gotten to share the name of their cat, which happens to be the password for the e-mail account they have shared. Because they got to upload pictures of their new credit cards and any information pertaining to them. Because they got to share some feelings or comments that make them sound... like not the sharpest tools in the shed. The way people think about sharing information is not so much about the type of information being shared, it is about whether or not they have given the consent for it to be shared. As long as they have only themselves to blame, everything is quite alright. Which is incidentally why people keep using Chromium.
No comments:
Post a Comment