Trust can be stolen as well as betrayed

First off, I wasn't planning to harp on this theme again. (Second off, apologies to @OrangeComputer for re-hashing something we chatted about before tonight's Linux User's Group meeting.) But this popped into the Twitter feed even before I logged in: Facebook caught sharing private data with advertisers.

Obviously, there's a lot of hardware and software magic that makes the internet work in 2010. On the human level, however, it only boils down to two factors:

1.) Filtering out the noise to focus on the signal(s) most important to us. That's what made Google's Page & Brin the bazillionaires they are today. Not trying to monetize an increasingly cluttered (and often obviously bought-and-paid-for) search "portal" like everyone else tried.

2.) Trust. The reason you don't buy anything from a URL that doesn't start with "https://." The reason you'll think about paying more to a brand-name retailer than an EBay/Craigslist scalper. And, quite possibly, the reason you signed on to various social media venues such as Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace...and even Facebook.

Assuming you're not just collecting followers, of course. But if the leverage for you creating the account was the fact that peeps you know are there, then the site is guilty of trust-skimming. In other words, the social media site was, however passively, your trust in your friends to make you feel comfortable with giving it the ability to eavesdrop on your chatter, to catalog your interests, to monitor your activities. Heck, I remember my first invitation to LinkedIn starting with a sentence like, "Because I trust you, I'm inviting you to join..."

No matter how zealously the social site guards your privacy, the technique's at least a wee bit slimy. In the long run, though, Facebook may be doing the online world a favor by showing us the truly nasty end of the sliminess spectrum. I just hope that a healthy percentage of its users take that to heart before Web 3.0 plugs us all into Zuckerberg's Matrix.