The Implications of a Facebook Society 226
FloatsomNJetsom writes "The site Switched.com is taking a look at the slow death of privacy at the hands of social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace with a link to a report on the creepy practice of Facebook employees monitoring what pages you look at and a thought-provoking video interview with social media expert Clay Shirky — who says that social networks are profoundly changing our ability to keep our private lives private. 'Eventually, Shirky theorizes, society will have to create a space that's implicitly private even though it's technically public, not unlike a personal conversation held on a public street. Otherwise, our ability to keep our lives private will be forever destroyed. Of course, that might already be the case.'"
Private Lives Private (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Private Lives Private (Score:5, Interesting)
So it's perhaps prudent to give control over the visibility of content, but at the same time, I think people need to realize that a person's MyFace page is not necessarily descriptive of them in every environment or context. Most people behave differently at work than they do with close friends. And being a lawfully drunk weirdo on your own time doesn't really bear much on your professional life unless you show up hungover. Which could happen either way.
My point: people should not take these sites too seriously.
Re:Egregious nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
The phenomena is similar to the shrinking amount of public space in the United States: A popular tourist destination in the city where I live used to be public property, and anyone could come with a sign and a cause and exercise their right to free speech -- including criticizing the government that maintained the large, open-air space. Within the past decade, the city sold the land and put the space under private management, and now one cannot go and peacefully exercise their right to free speech -- the private owner has far greater effective and legal discretion over what happens on their land. Most of us must move quite a bit through the space around them -- roads, offices, parks, hospitals, stores, and even virtual spaces -- and the ownership (common, corporate, or individual) has an effect on what we do and say, and what others can do and say to us.
Re:Private Lives Private (Score:5, Interesting)
It's exactly the same with malware protection, far too many users don't understand the risks in opening e-mail attachments or downloading 'free' wallpaper but there's no way to teach them, nor, in a non-totalitarian society, should there be. It's the price you pay for freedom - the freedom of illeducated users to operate computers.
Re:Idiots, not Facebook, spell the end of privacy. (Score:2, Interesting)
On the other hand, if you don't appear at all in any social site, that would sure make you a prime suspect to any NSA agent who would and should order further research on your social habits, probably digging more deep than you would ever wanted to.
Re:Private Lives Private (Score:5, Interesting)
There is the potential that, as social networking sites evolve, it may be possible to extract a non-trivial amount of information on a person simply from their associations with others, even if they choose not to add any additional facts to the mix.
I do agree that, at the moment, the majority of the people on these sites are being bitten in the ass by their own stupidity, but I don't think this necessarily holds in the future.
Re:Private Lives Private (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Private Lives Private (Score:5, Interesting)
If we can't keep PRIVATE data private (think of all the data leaks - credit card, SSNs, etc), what makes you think we can keep PUBLIC data "somewhat private"?
Perhaps the operating motto should be "data leaks happen". If you want limited visibility to some event, spread the news in a limited fashion. Otherwise checking the box that reads "friends only" puts the trust into whatever's ensuring that. But some gizmo, gadget, geegaw, what-have-you that someone wrote might (accidentally, ignorantly, purposely) ignore that flag, and boom, it becomes public.
It isn't new. It isn't confined to these "social networking" sites. After all, if you do something stupid in public, you're counting on everyone around you keeping it quiet so it doesn't show up on YouTube in 5 minutes. Now you're counting on one of your friends also not passing on this to someone else? Sure that "someone else" may not be able to view the source material, at which point it becomes another telephone game. Or someone just saves the picture and emails it to everyone, and soon your boss has it in his inbox.
To control information dissemination, it requires control on all levels. Don't want the general public to see it? Don't post it. "Friends only" is still public, just you've applied a little bit of DRM on it.
Ah, maybe that's the solution. You'll have to DRM-protect all this "Friends only" stuff to keep it only between your friends and not your friend's friends (and so on). After all, DRM works great on music and movies...
Baby/bathwater (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine that tied in with your phone, and you have something interesting. And FB has many other interesting and potentially interesting uses - the photo tagging is very nifty and the event organising also useful. But you have to be careful about security if you don't want to get bitten on the ass, and being careful with security is not so easy (or perhaps just not so natural) for the non-tech crowd.
Re:Private Lives Private (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure why you brought up personal behavior that affects your job performance; I already clearly stated that is an issue the employer should handle (and the only time an employees personal life is relevent).
I can't imagine why anyone would accept a situation where their job affects their personal life, unless the pay is enough to cover that. Otherwise there's no reason to accept such an answer.
I predict... (Score:3, Interesting)
As a consequence, there will be a grass-roots surge of enthusiasm for "internet privacy legislation", as all the young dolts who have posted videos of their misdeeds start to seriously worry about getting a job.
Re:Private Lives Private (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you ever considered that they might not care? Seriously, they might not. My son and his friends share things using technology it never would have occurred to me to share. Things I would keep private they share, and these kids will be the ones forming companies and running the technology world in the ot too distant future.
Privacy means different things to kids now. It may well be that all it will mean in the future is access to your money is restricted.
Re:Private Lives Private (Score:3, Interesting)
In large part I think this is just a case of generation X getting a bit up there in age, but refusing to admit that they're getting out of touch. Every generation eventually becomes the old men whose ideas of culture become laughably conservative to the one after it. Again, it's just proving more difficult this time around because it happens to be a generation whose defining point in many ways was rebellion against society.
Re:Private Lives Private (Score:5, Interesting)
The easy, kneejerk answer is DON'T POST IT ON THE INTERNET IF YOU DON'T WANT IT TO BE SEEN! But that is too simplistic an answer to a complex social problem.
American privacy law revolves around the idea, proposed by Brandeis and articulated by the Court in Katz, that it is the "expectation of privacy" that users have that determines how much privacy they are accorded.
When I post to an open thread on Slashdot, I have no expectation of privacy, other than obscurity, and that's not defensible. No one seriously argues that open fora have a high expectation of privacy (although you can make a contextual argument; if I'm "obviously" trolling Slashdot, or making an ironic post, the community may understand my post to mean one thing while an outside observer takes it another way. Look at the 4chan bomb scare or the GNAA. But that's not about privacy, that's about incomplete information.)
But let's say I have a Facebook with my privacy settings turned all the way up. Colleague A is my Facebook friend because they know me well and I decide to give them access to my information. Now, if I have all these privacy settings turned on, and I trust Colleague A, don't I have some expectation of privacy on my "public" Facebook?
I'd say yes. But what happens when Boss B threatens Colleague A to let him read my Facebook? I didn't extend access rights to him. In fact, I took affirmative steps to deny such access. Doesn't that go against my expectation of privacy?
It's an extreme example, but the kneejerkers who just say LOL YOU POSTED ON THE INTERNET IDIOT are ignoring the larger social and legal framework that these networks operate under.
Re:Private Lives Private (Score:2, Interesting)
To take a benign example, someone may send pictures of their kids to their immediate family. Your parents may well hang it up on the wall and then all of their guests see it. Putting it on a public website is like shouting it from the mountain, you can expect anyone who wants to know will find out, along with a lot of people who didn't want to know. Putting it on a semiprivate website is like, well, telling all of your friends. You can assume they will tell others and generally have no reason to expect them not to do that. Something that is meant to be truly private should be told only to those that have a reason to know and an obligation not to tell others.
Not a very special episode (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Private Lives Private (Score:3, Interesting)
This is true, but Facebook, Myspace and others provide a really simple means for people to upload photos and associate them with email addresses or real names. They are a data harvester's dream.
Trying to tell some of the (I'll hesitate to use the word I want) lesser savvy users why I don't want them putting my real name, anything about me or photos of me into the Intarwebs is like trying to talk to a brick wall. They just don't get why it's a problem. One idiot went ahead and actually put my phone number on her myspace page (after my little chat about why not to) with a helpful hint of "he's got a new number now, if he hasn't told you yet here it is". Not like I didn't change my number so that some of those people didn't have it in the first place!!!
I also had a myspace account that had no identifying marks in it. I used an alias and a dodgy email that I hardly use for anything (except dodgy, incapable of using BCC: to 100 people friends) to sign up to see what it was all about. One of my friends decided to try and add me using that email address and put my real name in one of the fields. Until I deleted it, if you searched for my real name on Myspace you could find that profile even though I'd never entered my true name into it.
You could probably s/myspace/facebook/g in this post and still be mostly accurate too.
Re:Private Lives Private (Score:3, Interesting)
If you actually watched the video, Shirky--who is a great guy, by the way--talks about how malls are public places too. But if you went around a mall with a boom microphone, recording the conversations of people near you, people would think you were NUTS, and might even sue you for invading their privacy. Why? Not because they're not in public, but because we have a social understanding that when you're in a crowd, people might hear what you have to say but they don't record it and they don't use it out of the context of the immediacy of conversation.
Now that's not a perfect analogy for the Internet, because by default everything on the Internet is recorded automagically. But the context part is still true. Even if a comment (like this one) on Slashdot is publicly accessible, if it appeared on CNN tomorrow I'd be just as shocked/uncomfortable/feel like something was slightly wrong as I would be if Anderson Cooper had hidden in a bush and used a directional microphone to catch my idle gossip in the food court.
As the kneejerkers show, we've begun to develop a social consensus that anything you put on the Internet is public and therefore you should expect that it be read by anyone anywhere anytime. That's the technological reality, and it might be the safest way to look at things.
But given our social hangups about eavesdropping--that is, observing conversations not meant for your ears and taken out of the context of the community in which they were made--in TRUE public settings, why is this the case?