Senators appeal to Facebook

Posted by Leah Anderson on April 27th 2010 to Administrative

I found this article interesting, as it demonstrates a very active role taken by national politicians related to something as (seemingly) trivial as Facebook:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/04/senators_pressure_facebook_to.html

My immediate reaction to this article was “why are our Senators spending time writing letters to Facebook when they should be dealing with more important stuff, like healthcare and immigration rights, and you know, other life-or-death types of things…?”. But after thinking about it, I realized that this action was more than just a publicity stunt directed towards their constituents of the Internet generation: it gives emphasis to the fact that Facebook, while it may have started as a place to post pictures of last night’s parties and stalk your ex-high school crushes, now represents the frontier in collection and storage of (non-financial) personal information–so its policies are likely to be referenced as standards in the “Sears Holdings Management/FTC” issue or “Quon v Arch” case of the future. And after our class assignments, we all know how beneficial (or dangerous) it would be for advertisers and other third parties to be able to store personal data indefinitely. Yes, this really does “fundamentally alter the relationship between the user and social networking site,” and I am glad that it was officially recognized.

[I wonder if those four senators would have been elected to office if information they had posted on Facebook in their youth was available to be stored indefinitely by media outlets…]

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