Behind the interrogation of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the US Senate this week lies a much more fundamental question about personal privacy, which is applicable in SA as it is anywhere else in the world. Are local laws up to the task of protecting individual personal privacy, not only from Facebook but hundreds of other information collection mechanisms? The essential problem with Facebook and other digital organisations like it is that while they present themselves as a service organisation for their users, their customers are not, in fact, their users, but marketing organisations, political and commercial, that are buying detailed access to users’ personal information. Much of this is benign. As irritating as it might be, most people recognise there is some advantage in being the recipient of marketing material because it provides access and awareness to what you might need. Even detailed demographic information can be useful, obviously to the marketing agent, but also to use...
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