Cable Traffic: WikiLeaks, Facebook, and You

As Wikileaks leaks occur with increasing frequency and with the usual suspects reacting in the usual ways and with no real bombshells going off, it won't be long until, for most of us, these sorts of disclosures become background noise. But there is a good reason they shouldn't: these are warning shots about the efficacy of privacy in every corner of the digital world.

As my New Yorker colleague Blake Eskin argues: If the United States can be embarrassed by a low-level employee those of us who live in Google Land and Facebook Ville should be a little more nervous with every Wikileaks disclosure.

As Eskin says:

Part of what comes with the State Department retaining the name “cables” for its now-electronic internal messages is the expectation of secrecy. The various classifications of cables—top secret, secret, noforn, secret/noform, confidential—remind me of the privacy settings for information shared on Facebook. You might let only certain friends see your e-mail address and phone number, but friends of friends can see your status updates, and everyone can see your Wall.

These gradations of secrecy or privacy permit the illusion that you can say something you wouldn’t say to the whole world. And yet, the data is all in Facebook’s servers, and the company has a history of expanding its user base, changing its policies, and revising its defaults, with the collective effect of its users sharing information with more people than they intended or expected to. Revelations about what a Saudi sheikh really thinks about Israel and Iran have broader repercussions than the photos of a bong-wielding Ivy Leaguer with her heart set on a career in banking. Both are open secrets, at least in certain circles, and the betrayal or horror the subjects both feel once their private words and actions spiral out of control are probably quite similar.

We are increasingly living on the cloud, and on a cloud if we think there aren't inherent risks that accompany the convenience of using a netbook or a tablet or someone else's storage space even from full-blown computer. It isn't time to panic, but to worry, at least a little.

It took one soldier with the rank of private first class to feed information to WikiLeaks. One day there might be a rogue employee at Google or Facebook or AOL or the company where you work who could make something public that you wish they hadn’t. Ultimately, all these systems come down to trust in other people, corporations, and governments. We know trust will be violated sometimes, but not every Internet user will do as Dan Gillmor, of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, has done, avoiding Gmail and Facebook in favor of “your own home base on the Internet that is controlled by you.” But how many of us can live that way? And I don’t mean knowing enough about technology to be masters of our own data. Life without trust can be unlivable.

Cable Traffic: WikiLeaks, Facebook, and You [The New Yorker]

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See Also:

• Wikileaks | Danger Room
• Wikileaks | Threat Level