"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..." -- George Orwell, 1984

I keep sounding the alarm about Facebook's plans to reshape the Internet. My Facebook friends probably think it's getting a little old. I mean, hell, I can tell by my news feed that many of them are "liking" things left and right, opening their profiles to third-party sites and to marketers "world wide." Zuckerberg's cronies claim that folks "like" (OMG, "love" even) the changes Facebook has made. And the company is gambling, I think, that most don't know or don't care about the implications FB's landgrab will have on the Internet. Go ahead and delete your Facebook account, we dare you -- that's the attitude of several tech blogs.

And there have been a lot of alarms recently. Almost every day this week, there have been new revelations about Facebook's inability -- either through negligence or unwillingness -- to keep user data private. Private chats and friend requests revealed. How folks voted in the UK elections revealed. IP addresses revealed. Facebook's new features add apps to your account without your permission. Not only does Facebook not give a damn about its users' privacy, it seems technically unable to protect it, even if it wanted to.

I'm not that surprised to see the Business Insider or some of the bloggers at Techcrunch gleefully embracing Facebook's changes. After all, it's a businessman and a marketer's dream: unlimited access to a customer's identity, background, and interests, as well as fresh set of "new leads" via the network that customer belongs to. And it's all well and good for someone like Robert Scoble -- who created a fan-page for himself on Facebook, if that's any indication of his desire for and comfort with public attention -- to say that "methinks we doth protest too much" about privacy. But honestly, I think that tech bloggers and the business world can be so busy salivating over the shiny happy semantic web Zuckerberg is promising, that we can forget some of the serious implications that can come when we shrug and say that "privacy is dead" (or what seems to be the collorary: "Shit, I'd rather have this than MySpace.)

1. Not everyone is "on board" with this whole social media thang and we're making it an even scarier place to be. Sometimes we geeks live in an echo chamber, where we pretend that everyone is checkin' in on Foursquare, that everyone thinks that Twitter is teh awesome, that everyone owns an iPhone or an Android, that everyone got into the Google Wave beta and declared it DOA, that everyone knows that Internet Explorer sucks. We point to the millions and millions and millions of folks with Facebook accounts and just figure that everyone "gets it," everyone "wants it," everyone "likes it."

For many people -- and I often think of teachers here, although they're certainly not the only ones -- it's still an uphill battle to convince administrators and executives that social networking is a good thing and that open and unfettered access to the Internet is important. I read a study this week (that thankfully, remained largely unreported) that concluded that the "use of social media in classroom settings has little effect on building connections or social capital among students." Even though many of us are evangelists for an integration of technology -- in the classroom, in the workplace, at home -- it's still a nascent enough field that we cannot really "prove" it's a useful or productive or positive tool.

Many of those people who are unwilling to embrace social media already point to fears about privacy (code for "lawsuits," in a lot of cases, I think). Facebook's disregard for privacy makes it even harder for some of us to advocate for its adoption.

2. Not everyone is vanilla. I get really sick of hearing people say that "I assume that everything I post on the Internet is public already." I mean, yay you for having such a mundane, vanilla life that there's nothing you do online that is at all politically, socially, maritally, or occupationally risky. Because I would contend there are lots of things -- lots of things -- we do online that we really don't want everyone to know about.

Some can be pretty banal. I don't need Facebook announcing what I've "liked" in the weeks leading up to my son's birthday. I don't need Facebook to note that I've been to WebMD to check out this weird rash thing I've developed (OMG, it's contact dermatitis, I friggin' swear). And thanks, but I don't want Facebook to share my sexual orientation or my political affinities or my location or my photo with anyone.

I don't need a "personlized experience" as I surf the web, because, ya know, I'm pretty adept at navigating things on my own. And while it's great to have recommendations for music and film and literature based on whether or not I enjoyed Iron Man 2 (meh, I didn't really), I really don't have any desire to allow marketers, app developers, and websites I visit know a goddamn thing about me without my consent.

3. The battle to define "open" and "public" is crucial. Just because Facebook has utilized the adjective "open" to describe its new initiative does not mean that Facebook has a damn thing to do with what lots of us have long considered to be "open" vis-a-vis technology. In fact, I'd contend the company's move is the opposite -- a move that could have really deleterious effects on access to the web-as-we-know-it. Facebook is a walled garden and when it says it's "opening," it's really just doing so to subsume the rest of the web into its domain. (But hey, go ahead and install that "like" button on your blog. PV FTW)

Perhaps this is the lit geek in me, but definitions matter. For example: Matt McKeon created an awesome infographic, detailing Facebook's changing privacy policies. The graphic demonstrates how much more of our data is, by default, public today than it was in 2005. McKeon notes in the description that he decided to create the infographic after reading EFF's timeline of Facebook's changing policies. When I saw that Inside Facebook linked to this graphic, but titled it this "Visualizing Facebook's Move Towards Openness," I threw up in my mouth a little. No lies.

More lit-geekery (and my apologies for this lengthy rambling post), but I can't help but think of Zamyatin's dystopian novel We (1920), in which residents lived in glass houses so that society is more open, errr, rather, so they can be more easily monitored by the police. Orwell often credited We as being an inspiration for 1984, in which it's the television, not the glass house, that makes it easy to track and trace citizens. So yeah, that's me, standing in the corner, hiding out from Zuckerberg, I guess, huh.

I realize how exciting all this data that can be gleaned about us can be. To build a smart and vibrant semantic web is, I think, a valuable project. But as Alex Iskold argues, "Facebook's goal is not to create a better, more structured Web. Instead, it appears that semantics is an afterthought in the race to capture user identity and information, in exchange for sending publishers the traffic."

While the battle to control users' privacy might seem like the most pressing issue given the company's recent snafus (and fuck-yous), I think the definition of what constitutes "open" is the issue we really need to be prepared to go to battle over. This is about open versus proprietary systems. This is about net neutrality. This is a battle for control of the tech industry, to be sure, and more broadly, it's a battle for control of information and for control of this new, online public sphere.