Facebook began as an invite-only social networking site in 2004, limiting it’s membership to college and university students, itself the product of Harvard university students Mark Zuckerberg and classmates. Membership swelled to nearly 1 million active users within a year, a number which quintupled by the end of 2005. The explosive growth continued when membership was extended to the mainstream in 2006 and today more than 350 million people have joined Facebook.
If you are one of the stubborn souls who has not joined Facebook yet, you might not be fully aware of all of the ways you can share information about yourself and others on the site. First of all, when you sign up, you are asked to use your real name. In addition to this, Facebook prompts you to fill in personal information like your gender, relationship status, birthday, home town, current residence, political, and religious affiliations. Fluffier pieces of information include your favorite books, music, movies, and television. You can upload a profile picture as well as make photo albums. You can also upload photos to your and others’ walls. ‘Tagging’ a photo allows you to label yourself and other people. And then there are the applications.
For years Facebook has faced criticism for changes they've made to their platform that affect their users' privacy. In 2007, Facebook launched Beacon, a third party app system which allowed anyone with the knowhow to develop applications that integrate their website or service with Facebook. Most often they consist of video games, quizzes or puzzles. Privacy concerns were first raised when users realized that their personal information could be collected or viewed by these other third-parties. One security engineer even claimed that Facebook was collecting information of their users activity on third party websites even when they were not logged in to Facebook.
From Private to Public
In July 2009, Facebook came under fire from The Privacy Commissioner of Canada for violating Canadian citizens' privacy. Based upon a document compiled by The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham decided upon several required changes that Facebook would have to make in order to comply with Canadian privacy laws. In response Facebook recently unveiled a new privacy platform. Facebook has made several changes which will continue to be tweaked and evolve:
- Facebook has done away with regional networks (work and school networks remain) and now centres around 3 circles of information sharing: everyone, friends of friends, and friends only. Facebook calls this ‘introducing Everyone’.
- The most noteworthy change is that every user’s default settings were updated and altered such that people’s friend lists, profile pictures, events, and pages are visible to everyone, meaning the public in general and not simply other Facebook users. Facebook refers to these things as ‘a common set of information’ in their privacy guide.
- In response to significant levels of complaint from users facebook is apparently going to allow users to hide their friends lists in the near future.
- By making these common sets of information publicly available, facebook is also allowed to give Facebook applications and websites access to that information. These applications and websites can also take any information you have made publicly available.
- All user generated information, such as wall posts and status updates can now be shared with ‘friends only’, ‘friends of friends’, or ‘everyone’ on an individual basis.
- Facebook does not list this information under their list of changes but notes in the ‘what’s changing’ section that while you can hide yourself from Facebook search results, your publicly available information now includes one's: name, gender, profile picture, networks, current city, friend list, and pages.
Facebook also outlines their ‘recommended settings’ to its users. Facebook recommends that you share ‘information that will make it easier for friends to find, identify and learn about you’ with ‘everyone’, including work information, status updates, and photo albums. For ‘more personal’ information, they recommend information like one’s “birthday, religious and political views, hometown, and photos and videos of me’ be shared with ‘friends of friends’. Finally they recommend one restricts their phone number and email address to ‘friends only’.
Facebook says these changes have been made to reflect what users are doing.
"We've paid attention to how people are using Facebook, and have noticed that people are generally sharing more information, and they are becoming more comfortable sharing some of that information with a broader set of people. We've also realized that many of our privacy settings—which have grown more complex as Facebook has grown—are no longer as relevant as they once were.
Many of the changes we're outlining here are to address these shifting social norms, the evolution of networks on Facebook, and the complexity of our settings."
Facebook argues that users are mostly already sharing their name, profile picture and friend list with the world and that they are expanding the information being shared to facilitate making contact with people you want to find. Facebook says they have included ‘everyone’ as in everyone on the internet to prevent Facebook users from having a ‘false sense of security’ about their privacy. Further to this, they note that getting people to make connections is their main product and that more connections can happen only when people are sharing more about themselves publicly.
This is followed up with an introduction to the new ability for Facebookers to control the privacy options for individual posts: ‘We want you to have the control to share information with as narrow or as broad of an audience as you choose.’ Huh? Perhaps by jumping to the new privacy options for individual posts they are trying to distract from the fairly major changes to their privacy platform?
To address The Privacy Commissioner of Canada's criticisms about Facebook Applications, they have made it so that applications can only access publicly available information. Considering that so much is now automatically publicly available that is quite convenient! It is also troubling that they have to note that anything restricted to friends only that the application wants to access will require one’s approval, as it's a reminder that heretofore applications did not need permission to access private information.
Facebook repeatedly outlines the privacy settings they would prefer you to adopt. Some of their recommendations are based on the idea that ‘many users already have these fields at this level, which makes sense considering this is information that helps people learn about each other’ (in reference to what you should share with Everyone). There is now a ‘Posts I Create’ setting and Facebook recommends you to share this with Everyone by default. Facebook notes that it might be weird to share your personal photos with Everyone so they recommend you to use ‘Friends of Friends’ instead and remove tags if you end up in photos you don’t want to be connected with.
"Ultimately, we believe these changes represent the right first step away from the former complexity and towards a more connected world. We hope we've given you the tools that empower you to share as broadly or as narrowly as is right for you."
Some people might argue that Facebook is no different from other popular websites like Twitter and Flickr. However Facebook differs from these sites in several key ways.
First and foremost, other sites allow you to use screen names that protect your real name. Obviously one can use a real name on Flickr or Twitter or a fake name on Facebook but Facebook expects you to use your real name.
The second big difference is that only Facebook has the goal of creating a global network, a world where everyone and their mother has joined their site. To achieve such global domination Facebook suggests friends for you by perusing the friend lists of your friends. Facebook will also encourage you to write on your friend's walls or get a friend to add more to their profile. Twitter and Flickr do nothing like this. I have also had the disconcerting experience of having Facebook suggest a friend who I have no common friends with. Of course, when you first join Facebook tries to scan your contacts from your email account. I agreed not really aware of the implications at the time.
Facebook’s main argument is that their new privacy changes reflect the changing tide of people's online activity. However one only has to read some of the comments written in reaction to the changes to see that perhaps this does not reflect the behaviour or wishes of Facebook users. People are concerned about having their friends lists be publicly available. People have already reported that they can predict the sexual orientation of Facebook users based on their friends lists. In November of last year Facebook issued a new privacy policy and set every users' list of friends to be publicly available without any option to roll back this change. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, several Iranian dissidents, and others protested the decision leading many of them to delete their accounts some in fear of being tracked by their government.
While people may (over)share on public sites like Twitter, they are choosing freely to do so and aware of it. By starting out as a relatively private site Facebook is now attempting to change the game for the sake of advertising profits, their bread and butter. While there will always be people who are only too happy to share their personal information with everyone, they are not yet the norm. And Facebook's attempts to turn user generated data into money is going to scare people away from sharing. The internet has been a place for people to expose themselves and find support for counter normative lifestyles for years. People do not need Facebook to 'empower' themselves.
Foot in Mouth
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of the company, had a wide open Facebook profile when the new privacy platform was unveiled, allowing everyone to see his personal photos, friends lists, and events. His ‘about me’ under his profile picture currently states “I'm trying to make the world a more open place by helping people connect and share”. Yet today his profile is markedly less open. One can no longer peruse his friend lists or events. So what happened? My guess is that the Facebook CEO found it too much to have thousands of people checking out his personal pictures and events. So much for empowerment eh?
Further Reading:
http://gawker.com/5427077/the-valleywag-guide-to-restoring-your-privacy-on-facebook
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Issues_during_2007
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/facebook-privacy-new/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:%20allfacebook%20%28Facebook%20Blog
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/184418/after_criticism_facebook_tweaks_friends_list_privacy_options.html
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