Facebook Privacy: A Virtual Panopticon?

Ever since Facebook became part of our popular culture it has been continually criticized for its privacy options and what they can do with our private information. Although it has altered these settings it is still not completely private from the company as they own everything you put on the site and it is impossible to 'completely' delete your account. But more importantly, Facebook has changed the way that we view and present private information which begs the question; what do we consider private information these days? I'm sure as recently as the 1990s no one would have predicted or even wanted every aspect of their life to be made viewable to anyone we consider a friend or even more so any random person on the internet, but yet today we have no problem with putting up personal pictures and details about ourselves right down to who we're in a relationship with.
  
This brings up the idea of the panopticon which is a building designed by Jeremy Bentham where in an institution a building would be place in the centre of a circular room allowing the guards to be able to watch the prisoners at all times without them being able to see the guards causing them to be on constant alert. How this works with Facebook is that we can never tell when someone is viewing our profile and therefore it makes us feel like we should always present ourselves in a way we want to be seen as even if we are not online, our avatars are constantly there.

 

Clive Thompson discusses in his article how the introduction of the Facebook news feed made people irate at first because they felt the things they were putting on their profiles were private and news feed allowed anyone to see it on their main page. Eventually people got used to it and felt that it was alright to give up our privacies because we could now view everything about everyone else. So even though Facebook is a public website, people still felt that what they were putting online was considered 'private' which makes us wonder what we really think of as private these days.
  
With our online avatars being accessible 24 hours a day even though we ourselves are not, it changes how we present ourselves to others so as not to show the full story of our lives but rather just what we deem to be acceptable and showing the good without the bad. In an age where we are constantly surveilled on a personal level it's hard to let up on our professional facade we convey, how much is it going to take before we finally realize Big Brother is close to being a reality?