I don't have much of an opinion about privacy concerns on Facebook. To the extent I have concerns about my privacy these days, they're more about things like credit reporting, which seems to me like a swampland where private companies can collect any kind of data they want about you — including the erroneous kind — and share it with anyone who pays them. And there's very little you can do about it and very little the government wants to do about it.
Whatever concerns I have about Facebook flow from reports that Mark Zuckerberg believes that privacy is a bad thing and we should all have unfettered access to anything we want to know about anybody. I'm not sure if that's him believing what's good for his business model or if he has a deep-down belief similar to one held by a long-ago lady friend of mine named Sandra. I don't even know if those claims about Mr. Zuckerberg are true but he's the last person on the planet whose privacy we should worry about.
Sandra — not her actual name — is a lady I dated briefly several decades ago…and by "briefly," I think it was like four dates. I am about to tell you why we didn't make five.
One evening when she was here, we wanted a pizza from my then-fave place to get one and they weren't delivering at that moment due to a paucity of delivering people. So I left Sandra here and went to fetch our dinner and when I returned, I found her browsing through my filing cabinet, calmly reading any folder with a tab that caught her eye. She did not act at all like I'd caught her spying or nosing around where her nose did not belong. To her, this was the most natural thing to do.
I asked her what she was looking for. She replied, "Anything you wouldn't want me to see."
As politely as I could, I asked her to remove her nose from my personal papers…and in so asking, I had incriminated myself. She asked, "What don't you want me to see?" The pizza got ice-cold as we discussed her theory that if I had anything to hide, she had the right to see it for her own protection. "What if you were once a serial killer and your parole papers are in here?"
Keep in mind that as she asked that, she was rummaging through folders of scripts I'd written for the Daffy Duck comic book.
I said, "I don't think serial killers have parole papers…or at least, they shouldn't. Secondly, you shouldn't be with anyone you even suspect might be a serial killer. I haven't run a check on you. It's just that there's stuff in there I'd rather no one ever saw…half-finished manuscripts, documents relating to business matters I'd rather forget…letters people sent to me with the understanding that I'd be respectful of their privacy. Some of the worst writing I ever did is in there…"
She said, "You write for the public."
I said, "I write for myself. Only when I think it's finished and good enough do I let anyone else see it." I've always had a strong reticence to let anyone view a work-in-progress. It would inhibit me greatly as a writer if I couldn't write with the belief that I can go wherever I want with it and that it's For My Eyes Only until I decide otherwise.
This conversation went on a long time, during which our relationship and the pizza got colder and colder. I did get her to stop ransacking my files then and there for evidence of my past serial killing. I did not get her to concede that I had any right to control my own work or what parts of my past I wanted to share and when. She only called off the search because she decided she didn't want to hang around someone who had something — doubtlessly, nefarious — to hide. Thereafter, she did not.
Whenever I see discussions of privacy, I think of Sandra and the right she felt she had for me to not have any. But then the other day, I was on Mr. Zuckerberg's little online world and I chanced to spot the name of a lady I dated back in college. That is, I recognized her first and old last names, followed by the addition of her married name. She had some old photos posted, several of which confirmed for me it was indeed the same lady. On a whim, I decided to drop her a message and say howdy —
— but then I read a little of what she'd posted. There was a lot there about how we should thank the lord that the gay Kenyan Barry Sotero "Obama" is out of the White House along with his two rented children and the transgender black man who fools no one passing for his wife. Partway through a screed about all the bogus "false flag" school shootings, I found myself thinking, "Maybe I won't re-establish contact with this person."
So I guess I have Mark Zuckerberg to thank for that. There's a difference between privacy and reading what people choose to make public.
