A Safe, Secure Place

After the first crescendo of facebook's growth, when Zuckerberg ran out of ivy league snobs ad ivy league wanna-bees to cajole into joining the network by mass of similar persons, facebook marketed itself as a secure place to do such things as store photos, talk with children, or reconnect with old friends, to a few shades of the demographic who were much older than the collage kids originally manipulated into the net.

I do not lie, it did this. It claimed to be a private place, safe on the internet for storing such things as images of impressionable children (A euphemism, perhaps, to ensure this specific line of text fails to deviate from my mother's version of appropriate. Use your imagination.) Locations, private data, and it successfully pulled in a great many of the adults who grew up in a nation where the government didn't tap phones and scan the post for watchwords, people who were concerned about what employers might think, and who wondered who was watching, not because they slavered for attention, but because they'd taken the horror stories to heart.

Because facebook once really stood for these ideas...or really appeared to, originally concerned persons joined facebook, and facebook grew to be a friendly meme in the public consciousness. But facebook is a firm, and interested in leveraging what it has into profit, and the masses of user information which it owns isn't nearly so profitable while its private...

Really, though, this story is only marginally related to facebook, where nothing is private, anymore. Its more concerned with why the vast majority of facebook users simply don't care. They don't care that their lives are recorded, and ignore it if they do, because this isn't a trend started by facebook, or by facebook's predecessors, but by terrorists.

Not Al-Qaeda, either...they merely provided the terror. These are the terrorists who took that terror, spread it around, maintained it for months, and years, so that for many of us, our youth was framed by it. By Guantanamo, by orange level terror alert days, by The War on Terror, wiretaps, the NSA, the TSA.

We're a population used to losing privacy, who allow that its better than the occasional exploding Muslim. At first, because the nation was supposed to be a safe place, and now? Simply because we're used to it. Nothing is private, the youth will say, without quite realizing what that means. We never had the chance to know.

America, home of the brave. Indeed.