In a recent study, researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University detailed how Facebook erodes users’ privacy.

Researchers found that during the first four years, users steadily limited what personal data was visible to strangers within their school network. Yet through changes Facebook introduced to its platform in 2009 and 2010, the social network actually succeeded in reversing some users’ inclination to avoid public disclosure of their data.

In fact, the social network’s new policies were not only able to partly override an active desire not to post personal details publicly, but they have so far kept such disclosures from sinking back to their lower levels, according to the study. They also found that even as people sought to limit what strangers could learn about them from their Facebook profiles, they actually increased what information they shared with their friends.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook has famously said that “privacy is no longer a social norm,”. He may well be right, thanks to his own service.

This downfall of privacy as a social norm is leading to the downfall of privacy as a legal right. But for most of human history, privacy has been a rare commodity. For most of the past 10 000 years, people lived in tiny villages, where everything about them and their family was public knowledge.

Marshall McLuhan, prophetic scholar of media foresaw the coming of the “global village: a planet in which information spread as fast as in the farming village of yore.”

Being a victim of the “Global Village” could happen to anyone, look at the countless sex tapes offenders who were none the wiser to the ramifications of their “encounters.”

[Source: CNN News]