‘Get Over It’

Pattern Seen in CEOs’ Provocative Privacy Declarations

November 29, 2010 by Louis Trager|Top News

Provocative statements about privacy by leading Internet companies’ CEOs continue a tradition set by predecessor high-tech chiefs, said industry players and researchers. Comments by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Eric Schmidt taken as characterizing conventional privacy complaints as overblown or outdated in the digital age follow in a line created years ago by Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, they said. The comments have gone well beyond other statements of their companies’ outlooks and they have invariably generated controversy, at least in the media and with privacy advocates.

But there’s little common ground in accounting for this pattern. Experts we interviewed ascribed it to everything from well-meaning consumer education, to starkly candid statements pulling back the curtain on the companies’ financial self-interests, to a disturbing libertarian-utopian Californian Ideology under which everyone is supposed to benefit by letting all the information about them hang out.

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people,” Zuckerberg said at a conference this year. “That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” He said Facebook’s policies, which have kicked up repeated furors from users and privacy advocates over what they consider excessive data sharing, are meant to reflect the new norm. A few weeks earlier, Schmidt had said in a TV interview, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” He has gone on this year to say that people who object to images on Google Street View can move. The comments, and the strong responses they brought, have a familiar ring.

McNealy had called consumer privacy issues a “red herring” in 1999. “You have zero privacy anyway,” he told reporters and analysts. “Get over it.” Supporting a proposal for a national ID card in 2001, Ellison told an interviewer from a San Francisco TV station: “This privacy you're concerned about is largely an illusion. All you have to give up is your illusions, not any of your privacy.”

Some industry insiders see little surprising and little to get worked up over in the comments. Mike Spinney, senior policy analyst at the Ponemon Institute, a privacy consulting and research firm, said the CEOs have simply been telling the truth. They've been doing a public service by speaking frankly about the realities of the digital era, he said.

Bruce Schneier, BT’s chief security technology officer, agrees that the CEOs have only been speaking out candidly. But he thinks it’s to a different end: “It’s in their financial interest to say it.” Schneier added, “These companies do do better the more that data is out there,” and the comments about privacy are meant to help their stock prices. Facebook exemplifies the pattern, Schneier said. “They do something, there’s outrage, and everyone gets used to it.”

TRUSTe CEO Chris Babel said what matters aren’t CEOs’ sharp comments or the contention they've stirred, but the reality that companies have made great strides in providing users transparency and choice concerning the use of their information. The progress this year has made the state of privacy much better than Babel expected when he took the TRUSTe job about a year ago, he said. Facebook and Oracle are certification customers of TRUSTe. Google isn’t. Oracle bought Sun in January.

Kate Raynes-Goldie said the statements reflect a creepy underside of Silicon Valley culture. Raynes-Goldie, a research associate at Ryerson University in Toronto, has studied Facebook and its users closely and she spoke at the International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners Conference in Jerusalem in October. Facebook has a corporate “culture of radical transparency,” a mission of “making the world more open and connected and transparent,” she said in an interview. At a Facebook developers conference in 2008, Zuckerberg “actually said that it’s going to save the world.”

Radical transparency dovetails with Facebook’s business interests but “conflicts with the conventional notion of privacy and managing your identity online,” Raynes-Goldie said. The company’s policies “push the envelope as far as they can,” she said. “People react. They take two steps forward and one step back.” The research considers the privacy philosophy an aspect of the Californian Ideology, a brand of libertarian “technological utopianism” especially strong among Silicon Valley startups. A central theme is that “we're all connected and we're all one and hierarchies are bad,” Raynes-Goldies said. The philosophy and Facebook’s privacy policies jibe poorly with the interest in information control expressed in the small groups of Facebook users she has studied in depth, she said.

A Google spokesman said by e-mail of Schmidt’s statement about complaints regarding Street View images: “Eric has already said that he clearly misspoke. And if someone is upset about Street View and wants their house removed, they can contact us through the site and we will remove it. Regarding our broader privacy philosophy, we work hard to provide users with transparency, control and security over the data they store with us. We do this by building innovative tools like the Google Dashboard, the Data Liberation Front and SSL by default in Gmail."

The spokesman declined to discuss all the rest of a string of comments by Schmidt that have attracted great attention, but he did add: “Re: his quote don’t do it during a long 1:1 on CNBC, Eric was talking about privacy in the specific context of the Patriot Act. If people have signed up for one of our services then law enforcement agencies may legally require us, like any online provider, to hand over certain information -- so users should think first before they click. Of course millions of people use online products every day to do things that are not illegal but which they rightly want to keep private —- for example working on their tax returns, e-mailing their doctor or sharing photos with family and friends and we work hard to protect their privacy online.” Neither Facebook nor Oracle responded to requests for comment.