Will You Sue Your Friend for Sharing Your Secret?

Suppose you had a secret to tell.

Nothing too earth-shattering -- it's not like a secret formula that will make you wanted by the FBI or anything.  It's just something about you that you wouldn't want the entire world to know.  For the reason you can't really explain, you are so compelled to share this piece of knowledge with someone.

So you seek out a friend that you think can keep his/her mouth shut.  You preface what you're about to tell him/her by "hey, promise me you won't tell anyone."  You then dump on him/her the load that was weighing on your chest, and voila -- you let out a sigh of relief.

Some days pass.  You're going about your business, then out of nowhere, you get a "dude... really?!?!" from one of your other friends that you haven't shared your secret with.  You dig a little deeper, and you find out the secret that you shared in confidence with a friend you trusted has become the salacious gossip among the circle of people you associate with.

What do you do then?  Do you unleash a can of whoopass on the friend you shared this information with and vow never to share anything personal with this person again?  Or... do you go even further?  Do you hold this accountable for violating you rights to privacy and prepare to sue this person?

I've been wanting to say something about all the hoopla surrounding Facebook's privacy issue for a while, but until today, I had not stumbled upon (geek pun intended) the offline analogy that can put this issue in the proper context to the critics of its privacy policy.

I think pretty much no one is denying that this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed.  At the same time, it is too big of a leap to hold Facebook accountable for the instances of privacy breach on its platform.

Unless you're a luddite, you will generally agree that technology has improved our lives.  In respect to mass media and communication, through the advancement in both the infrastructure (i.e. internet, broadband, cable, mobile, etc.) and applications (i.e. email clients, IM, social media platforms), your voice has become tremendously powerful, especially in its reach.  At the same time, for every positive change, there's not so positive byproduct.  As your reach becomes more pervasive, you may find it more difficult to curb it when you need to.

I think people are unfairly targeting such frustrations on relinquishing that control to the applications, and especially to Facebook since it is the biggest dog on the block.  However, Facebook (or any other applications) is just a program that's written to spit out an expected outcome given its input.  I understand that there (ALWAYS) are some unexpected consequences, and some of the responsibility for anticipating for such occurrences falls onto the creator(s) of the application.  At the same time, it's too big of a leap to hold the developer solely responsible for the outcome.  It's an impossible task -- it's like asking the developer to be a reader of the future.

In the end, the feeder of input controls the entire chain reaction from starting in the first place.  And the feeder of input is the user -- i.e. all of us take that advantage of the new media.  If we take ownership of what we share on the web and educating ourselves on the strengths and weaknesses of Facebook, or any other media we use to communicate, the privacy issue will become a non-issue (or at least not as big of a deal as it is now).