304 NEL PART 5: Entertainment and Popular Culture ISSUE 3 Social networks and privacy: Should government be more interventionist in protecting personal privacy? 8 NO Social Media and Privacy Protection: A Public Issue, an Individual Responsibility Boyd Neil A former magazine journalist, Boyd Neil has more than thirty years of experience in the public and private sectors as a communication strategist providing senior-level counsel to clients in the oil and gas, financial services, mining, and packaged goods industries, among others. As national practice leader of the social media and digital communications practice at a large Canadian communications consultancy, Boyd guides a team of social media consultants in providing clients with creative solutions to their reputation challenges. Boyd has M.A. and M.B.A. degrees from the University of Toronto. T he question of whether government should be more interventionist in protecting personal privacy on social networks contains two entirely different questions: 1. Should personal privacy be protected on social networks? 2. Should the government be more interventionist to assist in this? The answer to the first is yes; to the second, no. Let’s explore each one: first, the question of whether or not personal privacy should be (and needs to be) protected on social networks. The extraordinary phenomenon of the last ten years is not so much the new Web 2.0 technologies that facilitated the interoperability of social platforms, as well as user-generated content, but what the resulting social networks have brought about in terms of how democracy is practised, revolutions birthed and nurtured, relationships begun and ended, information and ideas shared and debated, and products devised and sold. For some it is difficult to imagine a world in which people could only talk on the phone or go to parties and meetings (often organized by phone calls) as a way to do all these things. Ubiquitous social networks have also brought into much sharper relief questions of privacy. People have surrendered—sometimes unconsciously or at least tacitly—various levels of personal data to social networks and other web-based applications. A billion or so people globally have relinquished their privacy on social networks like Facebook, Ren-Ren (Chinese), Badoo, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Google+ for the benefit of having a platform on which they can connect to friends, causes, products, and services. NEL-GREENBERG-12-0402-Part 5-Issue 3_N.indd 304 06/07/12 1:01 PM