The Implications of a Facebook Society

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

[srollyson (1184197)]

I don't think that sites like Facebook are "profoundly changing our ability to keep our private lives private." Rather, they're changing our ability to make our public lives more public. This is an important distinction, since these social sites make it quite clear by design that you are sharing your information with your friends and acquaintances. If people really wanted to keep the fact that they got smashed and rode horseback on their friend private, they'd just open up notepad and type away. Instead, they decide to broadcast that on a social website so their friends can see their drunken antics. Don't take this to mean that I condone the practice of Facebook employees (or gov't agents for the tin-foil hat crowd) browsing private profiles. There is an implication of semi-privacy if I set my profile to be viewable by friends only. If a potential employer sees Johnny McDrunkeverynight's public pictures and decides not to hire Johnny, fine. Maybe he shouldn't have used the megaphone (social websites) to broadcast his machismo.

Re:

[trolltalk.com (1108067)]

... or people need to start using pgp /gpg, and social networking platforms need to incorporate such technology more transparently into their sites.

Re:

[trolltalk.com (1108067)]

> "privacy is overrated and overvalued. desire for privacy is motivated by largely baseless fears and insecurities."

... which is why you posted as an AC ... you have "baseless fears and insecurities"?

Since you think privacy is useless, why not install a webcam in your shower. After all, according to your premise, all the pedophiles out there should be able to see your kids "neked".

Pravacy has its uses - one being that people should have better things to do than snoop on other people's lives.

Re:Private Lives Private

[Oldstench (1180217)]

[..]the general principle (that pretty much what we use it for is to hide stuff we shouldn't be doing) was about right.

I completely disagree with this premise. Privacy, personal space, and the non-invasion of unwanted and unknown others into my life are extremely precious to me and extremely difficult to find in today's overcrowded world.

By saying that I only use my privacy to hide illegal or 'immoral' activity is total crap. Is taking a shit while reading a book wrong? No. Do I want people to be able to watch me? Hell no. Same goes for having a private conversation with my girlfriend about her bad day at work, sitting in a comfy chair and disappearing into some great music on my headphones, or even jerking off to porn if it suits my fancy. No one else should be privy to that.

Is a more 'open' society what we really want? I don't believe so. The less I know about the randoms out there the better, as most of them would probably just piss me off or make me sick to my stomach. If some idiot wants to put everything they ever do online and others want to watch their every move, label them as the exhibitionist/voyeurs that they are and be done with it. Don't use it as a rallying cry to try and make society more 'open' as if this would suddenly cause world-peace.

---
When I destroy the Internet, I am going to start with LiveJournal.

Re:Private Lives Private

[cayenne8 (626475)]

"we are waiting for a new world, made from people who know what to make public and what not to, because they are fully aware of consequences. the problems like those stated in the article are in my opinion merely transitional. once the new reality sets in, there will be unwritten laws on what to do / what to say / how to behave online, not unlike those we abide by in public IRL. until then, people will suffer for them not being careful and bitch about it. oh well."

I dunno...the younger age group there, really does not understand or comprehend how their actions being published on the net can have LONG term consequences. It wasn't that long ago I was in that mode of mind, and when you are in the bulletproof years, you needn't worry about anything.

I think that publishing so called 'bad' behavior (hey, not saying it isn't fun), and all is a bit more glorified these days when you see the likes of Paris and Brittney...getting tons of attention and press for bad behavior. The trouble is, a kid that wants to emulate them, be famous for being famous, doesn't quite see that Paris and Brittney pretty much have unlimited funds available to them. They are wealthy, and do not have to worry about employment, or clearances later in life for good paying jobs.

In the past as a kid, if you got drunk and did something stupid (again, I didn't say it wasn't fun to pull shit like this)...you hoped it wasn't documented more than some pictures you could get the negatives too. YOu could outgrow these episodes, and heck, at the worst...MOVE away from them to another city.

But, what gets on the internet stays on the internet...potentially forever. For anyone to see.

That's just a little scary. A childhood bit of fun, that can harm you for the rest of your life. But, as a kid, you don't think that far ahead.

I think in the next 10 years when we really start seeing the results of this type of thing, we will see a lot of lives that can reach less that what they potentially could have, or more acceptance of a person's past behavior that was a bit childish.

If you think the latter, then ask yourself by today's politicians aren't more frank and public about their past 'drug' indescresions...since we are now starting to get well into the age ranks of people where very few are out there that never even tried any before ever. Nope...still taboo if you want to be in public office.

Re:Private Lives Private

[djasbestos (1035410)]

I think it's important for users (and developers) of such sites to keep in mind that most people want only a limited degree of visibility. Like you said, people do want to share those drunken escapades with their friends, but not necessarily with strangers, or worse, employers, or worse, mom and dad.

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:Private Lives Private

[peragrin (659227)]

So it' like a girl who wants to have pornographic pictures taken of her for money, yet is all pissed off when her father buys that very magazine two months later.
My opinion. You want privacy, You want Only certain people to know certain things. you don't publish them on a website, you don't run around a bar with whomever doing stupid things.

In general the information on FAcebook/myspace/ etc is ultimately harmless, As those people will tell their co-workers eaactly what thy did anyways

Re:Private Lives Private

[tlhIngan (30335)]

I think it's important for users (and developers) of such sites to keep in mind that most people want only a limited degree of visibility. Like you said, people do want to share those drunken escapades with their friends, but not necessarily with strangers, or worse, employers, or worse, mom and dad.

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...

Re:Private Lives Private

[Petey_Alchemist (711672)]

There is a great book about this called "The Unwanted Gaze" by Harvard Professor Jeffrey Rosen. He gives many examples about how incomplete context can negatively shape otherwise innocuous information.

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.

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[kieran (20691)]

While it's true that people are foolishly publishing information publicly that they could easily keep private, this is essentially a matter of poor user education. There are plenty of people on Facebook who simply don't understand the privacy implications of posting stuff on their profile, and the privacy setting defaults are wide open.

If we really want social networking to be acceptable to the world at large and to keep the scare stories under control, we need to do a better job of educating users and/or p

Re:Private Lives Private

[Silver Sloth (770927)]

we need to do a better job of educating users

Who's this 'we' who needs to do a better job of educating users? If you're saying that Computer Studies in school should concentrate far more on issues like this then I agree but the vast majority of users have left school and how exactly are 'we' or whomever, going to educate them.

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:Private Lives Private

[ZombieWomble (893157)]

I think one of the big issues with the development of the social networking sites is that it's not always the person's decision to be featured on facebook - I don't have an account on facebook/myspace/etc, and yet I know there are numerous photos of me, labelled as such, on those sites, because I associate with people who do use them. It's not a big deal at the moment (the photos are only linked in the most tenous of ways, and none of them are particularly dodgy), but there is a potential there - even if someone isn't actually actively participating in such sites, there is likely to be information on them there.

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

[MoneyT (548795)]

Then you need to speak with the people you associate with about your expectations of privacy. It's not facebook's fault your friends are violating your privacy.

Misunderstanding Facebook

[TechnicolourSquirrel (1092811)]

I think one of the big issues with the development of the social networking sites is that it's not always the person's decision to be featured on facebook - I don't have an account on facebook/myspace/etc, and yet I know there are numerous photos of me, labelled as such, on those sites, because I associate with people who do use them. It's not a big deal at the moment (the photos are only linked in the most tenous of ways, and none of them are particularly dodgy), but there is a potential there - even if someone isn't actually actively participating in such sites, there is likely to be information on them there.

You're not on Facebook -- this is why you don't understand how it works, but you have recourse here. You can join Facebook, maintain a very small friends list, and set your profile to be unreadable by anybody else. Then you can change your privacy settings so that photos tagged of you are only visible to those on your friends list. This affects even photos tagged of you taken by other people. That way even if one of your friends decides to make their profile public, any photos they tag of you submit to YOUR privacy settings, not theirs. And since they can always see their own photos, they probably will not even notice that you have restricted their material to YOUR friends list. You don't even have to log in to maintain this privacy barrier -- any future photos that are tagged with your name submit to the same privacy settings. You can even go in and tag the photos with your own name yourself so that they WILL submit to your privacy settings. Facebook is not like Myspace -- it's very much better thought through, and much more private by default. In fact I find them to be completely opposite in their core approaches. People who say Facebook/Myspace in one breath generally don't get it.

Idiots, not Facebook, spell the end of privacy.

[xC0000005 (715810)]

If you stand on the corner and scream out your inner most thoughts, don't be suprised if anyone within a few blocks knows (and crosses to the other side of the street when they see you coming). Don't want something known widely? Don't post it on a public web site.

Solution: don't join facebook?

[VorpalEdge (967279)]

It's not like anyone is forcing you to join it or other social networking sites. If you must join it, just have a cursory account and don't update it, ever. Just use it to read your friend's news or whatnot.

You can only lose privacy in this sort of thing if you give the info out to begin with. If you don't do that, you're pretty safe.

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[Rik Sweeney (471717)]

The only problem is that someone can just post a picture of you having a pee in the middle of the street on a Saturday night and then next thing you know, it's in a national newspaper.

Rather like this [dailymail.co.uk]

I'd comment on this...

[by Anonymous Coward]

But I have a feeling someone is watching!

*gasp*

Egregious nonsense

[Angst Badger (8636)]

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. ...Or you could just refrain from posting the details of your private life to the Internet.

Re:Egregious nonsense

[TheViewFromTheGround (607422)]

Saying that you can simply refrain from posting the details of your private life to the Internet misses part of the point here. To communicate with many of my friends, who insist on using social networking sites as their main avenues for staying in touch with friends, I am forced to use a privately-owned network where many of my rights may be waived. You could say, of course, that I should not stay in contact with those friends, but in real life it is not so easy to make such demands, especially when we are talking about communicating with relatives and dear friends, often in cases where communication is essential, such as family emergencies. Pragmatically, it just isn't always feasible to say "use the public internet and the (broken) standards for email."

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.

Future Society

[Grandiloquence (1180099)]

I think they're referring to the Facebook Wars of 2013, after which the nominal Facebook World Government will require all citizens to publish their most intimate details online for public scrutiny.

Or you could just, you know

[Sycraft-fu (314770)]

NOT POST YOUR SHIT ON FACEBOOK!

Seriously, I'll never understand these stories that seem to make it as though you have no choice but to divulge all sorts of personal details online. No, actually not the case. If you wish, you can simply not participate. I personally don't. You can search Myspace, Facebook, and so on, you'll never find anything about me. I don't have a page, don't want a page. I just don't participate in that part of the Internet.

However, even if you do, you can simply not be an idiot about it. It is perfectly possible to create a personal site and give away only the kind of details that you are ok with. There's plenty of information on all of us that is public anyhow, maybe you limit it to just that, or a subset of that. You can have a page and not tell everyone everything about your life. The only problem is if you post intimate details, but expect that only the people who you approve of will see it. That is just, well, stupid. Even if the site claims to have privacy features, don't count on it.

The test I say you should apply is a three factor one: Do you want your mom to know this? Do you want your boss (present and future) to know this? Do you want a creepy sex offender to know this? If the answer to any of those is "no" then DON'T POST IT! Why? Because all three of those people can use the Internet, so all three might come across your page. As such filter your information. Don't post anything you wouldn't want your family to find out, and certainly don't post anything you wouldn't want your work to find out about.

If people just apply a little common sense to it, it really works out ok. You don't have to participate, and if you elect to, if you are just smart bout it and don't do shit like post pictures of you and your friends getting high, you'll probably be just fine.

Not a very special episode

[CristalShandaLear (762536)]

'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. Reminds of a sitcom episode - I think Boy Meets World or Growing Pains. No it was Blossom. Joey, Blossom's goofy brother, gets caught cheating on a test. So he spends all this time trying to find undetectable ways to cheat. He finally decides to hide the answers in the one place only he can look and that the teachers can't see - in his mind. We are perfectly capable of keeping things private if we choose to do so. The problem I have is when other people give up their privacy, or maybe even a piece of their privacy - and that is used as an argument for that person to surrender their remaining privacy or for everyone else to surrender their privacy as well. We all have the right to determine what is private for ourselves.

Re:this is article is completely stupid

[Billosaur (927319)]

and EVEN IF there is someone out there who is so stupid as to think posting this information is private: who amongst us ever thought it is our duty in this world to protect morons from themselves?

One word: Congress

Re:This would only hold true...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak (773371)]

But that's just it, isn't it: what you make public becomes public.

Yes, and what other people post about you also become public. Bear that in mind.