Facebook's Privacy Debate Misses the Point

11:52 AM Wednesday May 26, 2010 | Comments ( 8)

The ongoing media and blogospherian outrage about Facebook's behavior, and purported misbehaviors around the social network's privacy policies and practices intrigues me. (Disclosure: My brother, Elliot Schrage, is a top Facebook executive; I've been an occasional resource for him on these issues). My intrigue comes not from the unsurprising intensity of response or the elegiac laments for — all together now! — the death of privacy.

No. I'm fascinated by how decoupled and divorced this "Future of Facebook" kerfuffle is from simple professional realities. Facebook could vanish tomorrow. But global industry's real-world workplace investments around privacy would remain. More important, the impact of these investments on everyday work life quality would be bigger than any 50 Facebook friends. The focus on Facebook misses the more important story. The battle over professional privacy is over. Privacy lost. Deal with it. (Sun's Scott McNealy offered a similar message.)

A quiet but thorough technical revolution is turning professionalism's privacy paradigm upside down. What was controversial a decade ago is today's indisputable fact and tomorrow's human capital destiny. Less personal privacy equals greater professional productivity. Better yet, less personal privacy assures greater professional safety. For CEOs and fast-trackers alike, that's a compelling value combination. The public debate about personal privacy may just be hotting up (sorry, Mark.... ); but the workplace privacy argument is just about over even though it appears politically incorrect to say so. A preponderance of evidence declares professional privacy economically inefficient for the enterprise and potentially dangerous for personnel.

This argument has virtually nothing to with reading people's emails or monitoring their calls. That's so last decade. That debate was all about how workplace monitoring infantalizes employees and treats them disrespectfully. In the overwhelming majority of workplaces, that debate is simply going away. It's analogous to the CCTV in public places cries of civil libertarians. Are there downsides to cameras in the public square? Of course. But their ability to help forensically recreate events even more than their deterrent qualities have blunted what was once sharp criticisms.

It's not CCTV but GPS that's been the transformative workplace technology for privacy. The ability to track, either asynchronously or in-real-time, the physical location of employees turns out to be unexpectedly important in a number of ways.

If you're a FedEx, UPS, or any kind of logistics organization, GPS has become mission-critical for resource allocation and network efficiency. The business literature on how location-tracking and scheduling can improve returns on people and process effectiveness has grown impressively. If your people are visiting customer, client, or partner sites to get work done, the ability to know where they are supposed to be — as well as to reach them — becomes part of the job. If people aren't reachable — if they aren't findable — during working hours, then they are literally missing.

"Missing" has become as professionally unacceptable as a busy signal or a mobile phone that doesn't offer voicemail or accept texts. People who prove consistently difficult to find during work are not-so-tacitly inviting greater scrutiny. When employees increasingly rely upon organizationally-subsidized Blackberries and iPhones that are pre-loaded with GPS, it's difficult to argue that the company doesn't have an obligation — let alone a "right" — to know where its phones are. On what basis does an employee traveling on business have a "right" to be untrackable?

That question becomes particularly poignant and practical in light of unpleasant realities. Every organization I now work with has an employee tracking program in case of emergency. Most of these programs were put in place in the wake of the 7/7 London mass transit bombings. You can't always count on your people being able to call or text in. The ability to track a colleague in an emergency can easily become a matter of life or death. Extreme? Of course. But what do you say as a responsible executive to the family of an employee you weren't able to — or declined — to track using technology? It is now easier to imagine scenarios where companies are pilloried and punished not for invading the privacy of their employees but for not being able to locate them within ten minutes of a declared emergency. A decade ago, location-monitoring was an unethical breach of trust; tomorrow, not monitoring will be seen as dangerously unethical.

Of course, innumerable examples of entertaining, and even horrific, GPS-enabled detection of bad behavior exist. But someone going off to have a beer with a client in the middle of the day is professionally different than someone just going off to have a beer. Is it unethical, disrespectful, or unprofessional to be able to check if someone is where they say they are? Sorry, but I don't see that as any more unethical, disrespectful, or unprofessional than checking someone's business expenses. They are part of the job. What's the counterargument?

It's fashionable to say that digitalization, virtualization, and telepresence has rendered geography less relevant in this post-industrial age. That's more true than not. But that makes those times when geography is relevant disproportionately more important. Organizations understandably believe that "privacy" as defined by "lack of trackability" makes no business sense. To the contrary, the ability to know where your people are becomes more important, as well.

So lean back and enjoy how Facebook confronts, cajoles, and accommodates the critics who declare it Privacy's Public Enemy #1. You may say "tsk- tsk" to Facebook's 26 year- old multibillionaire founder who so cavalierly treats the personal information of over 400 million users. But, when you do so, please check to make sure your GPS is working.