John Oliver on the Facebook Privacy Hoax

As many readers will already know, there is a pandemic that has resurfaced on the timelines of Facebook pages everywhere. As a part of this privacy scare that has come as a side effect of the evolving digital world, Facebook users have once again began spreading messages claiming ownership of their Facebook content like the social plague that it is.

Reaching a magnitude large enough to catch the attention of investigative comedian John Oliver of Last Week Tonight, these messages are not only multiplying exponentially in number but also developing comic typos among the already virtually meaningless block of text that users claim (and in many cases believe) "protects their rights." In this video, John Oliver discusses the problem in a little more detail.

Facebook Privacy Hoax Debunked
THE FACEBOOK PRIVACY PROTECTION MESSAGES ARE HOAXES! WATCH THIS VIDEO TO HEAR JOHN OLIVER EXPLAIN HOW TO ACTUALLY PROTECT YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION.
Posted by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on Wednesday, September 30, 2015

While John touches on the problem at hand, this perhaps may only be a symptom of a much larger disease. The greater question to ask, from my perspective, would seem to be "What are the larger implications of this kind of culture?" To examine this, I'll refer to the example below.

There are two clear and distinct social phenomena in this message and at least one major legal aspect. On the social front, we can see 1) that there is a concern about privacy rights on websites that we have given digital consent to invade said "privacy" and 2) that social media users will conduct little to no research (apparently not even in the form of a logical mental analysis) before hastily sharing a block of text they do not truly understand on their Facebook timeline. The implications of this almost reckless attitude which has its roots in the very core of internet culture is dynamic and intimidating. What else do users unwittingly spread, and more interestingly, why else will users share without caution?

The other interesting aspect is the legal component. The posts tend to claim that the user has exclusive ownership and cites an irrelevant section of legislation as its support. As John mentions in his segment, this post itself has no legal foundation. But it does, however, raise an interesting point about online content. Who should own content posted on websites that a user "consents" to the privacy policies of without possibly being able to understand it? With modern cloud storage and computing, where is the line of ownership and IP? Similarly, where should the line be?

These are all questions we need to contemplate in our day to day lives. The more advanced technology gets, the more these seemingly impossible questions will come to the fore. Personally, I have chosen to store personal files on Google Drive, submit my work to GitHub, post my content on YouTube, and undoubtedly dozens upon dozens of other examples of sharing my content through a service which I do not explicitly own. Even this blog post, which is on the domain blogger.com (owned by Google Inc.), created and managed by Professor Vinsel, for a class at Stevens Institute of Technology. So who owns this blog post? And, more importantly, who should? I'd tell you, but unforuntately I didn't read the privacy policy before publishing on Blogger.