Facebook is in the news again with more of the same. They sold users personal information without consent, turned a blind eye to blatant abuses of the data they so willingly sold, etcetera, etcetera.
Don’t get me wrong. My blasé attitude toward Facebook’s many privacy violations shouldn’t serve to diminish the seriousness of what they did. It was very, very bad. I just find it frustratingly normal that government officials are just now tuning in to something the rest of America has known for years. Facebook isn’t healthy. All it takes is one trip through the comments to know the social media giant has absolutely no concern for the wellbeing of its users, while it seems the government, once again, is lagging behind.
I’m not saying there’s anyone to blame. It’s not an issue of who is at fault, but a difference of approach. Technology moves fast, is innovative, while government moves slow, and regulation comes in reaction to trespasses. At 29 years old, I have been around just long enough to see the internet go from a laboratory experiment to a global utility, and it seems like it happened almost overnight. But that’s how these things work. Technology moves faster than government, and by the time legislation catches up with wrongdoing, the violation has already evolved into something beyond the scope of the regulatory guidelines.
For me, it helps to think of social media as a synthetic drug. A new drug is created, people overdose and die, investigators find the drug, scientists figure out what it is and politicians ban it. In practice, the method works, but in reality, a newer version of the drug, using just different enough ingredients to fall outside the regulatory description, was created by the time the political process got to step 2. Technology is no different. Continual technological innovation, like in the drug trade, renders the process of regulating the industry obsolete. It’s just too slow.
If we’re ever to get ahead of technology, we need to create guidelines for the future. Instead of addressing things that already exist, we need to develop an understanding of what we want online interaction to be in the future and be proactive, not reactive, with our data.
Thomas is the managing editor of the Appeal. He can be reached at thoward@newtoncountyappeal.com.
