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Mark Zuckerberg being swarmed by cameras is the perfect metaphor for online privacy today

Mark Zuckerberg being swarmed by cameras is the perfect metaphor for online privacy today

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Dehumanizing, isn’t it?

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Testifies At Joint Senate Commerce/Judiciary Hearing
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The iconic moment from Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate hearing yesterday came before he faced toothless questions from profoundly uninformed senators. It happened when the Facebook boss walked to his seat and was confronted by a wall of wide-angle camera lenses and photographers jostling for position, each of them trying to capture the most distilled picture of a CEO under fire. Zuckerberg’s personal space was eroded by the heaving throng, and he was treated less as a human and more as an object of fascination.

In that moment, Mark Zuckerberg must have felt what it was like to be a user of his online platform. Every inch of his being was subjected to close scrutiny, observation, and recording for posterity. Whether he liked it, whether he could meaningfully consent to it, or not.

I felt a twinge of vicarious discomfort while watching from thousands of miles away, and it was a sense shared by countless others. That translated into a few sympathetic comments, some disbelief, but mostly a ton of sardonic analogy to Facebook’s own privacy practices.

When you go online today, securing your privacy can feel as futile as dodging raindrops in a monsoon. If you want to communicate with friends, exchange work emails, shop or pay your bills, or do any manner of banal and basic things online, you’ll wind up with a browser full of tracking cookies. For the average person on the internet, giving informed consent to that tracking and snooping is not really possible — in part because, as revealed by Zuckerberg himself yesterday, companies like Facebook and Google don’t have any real competition, and so their users don’t have viable alternatives to turn to.

The camera lens is a powerful symbol for voyeurism, and here, it was turned on the CEO of a company accused of snooping on citizens, or at least of exploiting our expectations of privacy. Later, the same flock of photographers snapped Zuckerberg’s notes as well, revealing he was prepared for much tougher questioning than he ended up receiving.

I don’t like the inhumanity with which Mark Zuckerberg was treated in the build-up to his Senate hearing. Nor do I like that his notes, which were presumably intended to remain private, were published for the whole world to see. But the Facebook chief was in a predefined context of public enquiry and transparency. You could argue he should have expected little privacy — he knew that sitting in the chair would mean having cameras all over him. Can the same be said about Facebook users who think they’re sharing and interacting with their friends in private?