The Internet Perils of Pauline

We have Internet privacy issues and it’s no surprise.

Except to the media who would have you believe what a problem it suddenly all is.

Like a lot of things that have been bad for a while, however, the real surprise is why suddenly it’s contemporary to be upset about it.

Why do we look to the media to whip us into a frenzy about things like social media privacy issues, security breaches and data mining? We weren’t at all concerned when we first signed up for Facebook.

Again, it’s not something that just happened last week.

Facebook didn’t invent data mining. They just perfected it. And it was far easier than it should have been because we literally entrusted them with our lives.

We surrendered our privacy upon creating “free” social media accounts and now we feign outrage over it because of the loss of sensitive data.

I’m going to be spending less time on Facebook now. Either that, or I’m seriously closing my Facebook account once and for all.

Yeah, right.

In addition to creating false outrage, the media and social media networks have generated an unprecedented level of apathy. This was accomplished by delivering the elusive, addictive, “Like” to each and every one of us.

The “like” is pure genius and evidence of the innocent nature of social media, right? I mean, social media is not meant to have negative connotations or else there’d be a “dislike” button, you know what I mean?

Consequently, the outrage over privacy issues rings hollow compared to the reality that is the majority who just don’t care.

So, you can’t fool me.

As long as we get our attention fix, we’ll keep at it. We’re not disconnecting or abandoning the grid. Hardly. We crave attention to our cores. And we use the “like”, the genius spawn of social media’s founding fathers and mothers, to get it.

Shouldn’t individuals responsible for personal information theft be punished?

We don’t care, or at least we didn’t care until recently, how much of our personal information was culled by social media.

“I don’t have anything to hide. So, I’m not worried what information they get.”

This was the mantra for operating within the walled gardens of places like Facebook.

I never could argue or even debate in the least with someone of this mindset. When people make statements that obscure reasonable points entirely, there really is no merit to discussing both sides of a given topic.

For me, I still don’t get the sudden hysteria over social media’s pitfalls–especially considering that they’ve always been there.

What were we thinking would happen down the road as social media networks are well into their second decades of questionable practice? Did we really believe we could post huge chunks of our personal lives online that included documents formerly residing in locked file cabinets?

We unwittingly posted anything and everything online without giving thought to consequences. Social media are fun, right? They have our backs, man. Our privacy settings were locked down, were they not?

After all, only our “Friends” could see this information. The ones who had their settings on “Public” were the ones really flirting with disaster. We were in “private” Facebook groups that no one could be in without an invitation, so we should have been safe. Surely anything we did, posted or said in these places was only viewed by people in the group, right?

Outrage and false bravado typically arise when people have no clue as to how to solve a problem.

When I was a manager I enjoyed coming across resumes where people listed “problem solver” as one of their soft skills.

Soft skills, hard skills, branding and human capital.

These are terms that arose seemingly from the not-so-cement-like foundations of social media.

The global economy delivers a world where people thirst to be told how to live to avoid dangers like invasions of privacy.

Being on Facebook was living. Literally everyone was doing it. It wasn’t supposed to go wrong. It wasn’t supposed to create problems we can’t solve.

Maybe I should seriously consider getting off it.

Nah, dude said he was sorry. Everyone deserves a second chance.