Not an isolated event

Facebook/ WikiLeaks: Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has been crowned Person of the Year by Time magazine. WikiLeaks boss Julian Assange, meanwhile, topped the associated reader poll. A certain arrogance and superior coding abilities aren't the only parallels between the two men. Both are also leading the technological assault on privacy.

The two organisations have obvious differences in scale and intent. Facebook has more than 500 million users and is profitable. It aims to give people “the power to share”. WikiLeaks is a small non-profit that believes, among other things, in “the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices”.

But the two organisations share a devotion to the idea that society benefits when more is made public. Facebook's personal information-sharing facilitates everything from keeping up with friends living overseas to finding fellow beekeepers living in Brooklyn. WikiLeaks, in contrast, explicitly encourages “leaks” of ethical, political and historical significance, including as it turns out state secrets, in the hope of reducing corruption and increasing political accountability.

Whether either Facebook or WikiLeaks will live up to their leaders’ divergent but comparably idealistic hopes is questionable. Extra status updates can bring friends closer or just irritate, and personal data shared online can give away more than is healthy. Likewise making ambassadorial dispatches public can shine a disinfecting light on a government’s role in unsavory deals - or hurt efforts to forestall damaging conflicts and put undercover agents in harm's way.

Both organisations are gaining status and so are their leaders, as the Time selections attest.

This may, however, be their golden hour. Technology has made it much harder to keep things hidden or to hush them up once exposed. But the costs of bringing formerly private things to light are likely to become increasingly evident. Even the relatively benign-seeming Zuckerberg, now in command of huge amounts of personal information, is likely to face calls for far greater accountability from Facebook’s mass of users and their representatives.

For his part, Assange has chosen to provoke governments and big companies. But both Facebook and WikiLeaks are in the vanguard of exploiting the Internet’s power to collect and broadcast once confidential information. Whatever the constraints eventually imposed on either model, the genie is out of the bottle. Already, privacy is the Person of Last Year.