The Anti-Choice Privacy Fundamentalists: “Most companies act responsibly and allow users to opt-in when appropriate. Even Facebook, which constantly receives criticism from privacy fundamentalists, has used opt-in as it deploys certain new features. For example, in January, Facebook rolled out a feature to allow users to share their contact information with others through Facebook. As Facebook described on its Developer Blog:
On Friday, we expanded the information you are able to share with external websites and applications to include your address and mobile number. With this change, you could, for example, easily share your address and mobile phone with a shopping site to streamline the checkout process, or sign up for up-to-the-minute alerts on special deals directly to your mobile phone.
As with the other information you share through our permissions process, you need to explicitly choose to share this data before any application or website can access it, and you can not share your friends’ address or mobile number with applications. Also, like other data you make available to third party apps and websites, you can always clearly see and control the ways your information is being used in the Application Dashboard.
Many privacy advocates immediately derided this new feature even though users would have to expressly give permission every time an application wanted to obtain access to their contact information. Blogs like the Huffington Post were awash with misleading headlines such as “Facebook Starts Sharing Your Home Address, Phone Number With Developers.” And groups like EPIC immediately objected to the new feature claiming that Facebook was “trying to blur the line between public and private information.”
It has become clear that opt-in is not enough for privacy fundamentalists. The objections likely stem from the fact that these groups fundamentally oppose the idea of corporations having personal information, not just about themselves, but about anyone. Their paternalistic view of Internet users is at the heart of arguments in favor of government regulation to protect consumers from themselves. They do not want to give users choice, they want to make the choice for users.
The goal of policymakers should be to give users the freedom to choose their own privacy settings; it should not be to enforce a rigid privacy doctrine on all users. As Congress considers privacy legislation in the coming months, it should remember that the focus should be about finding ways to empower users through competition, choice and innovation, not about taking away their freedom to choose.” http://www.innovationpolicy.org/the-anti-choice-privacy-fundamentalists
