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September 8, 2006
Facebook's "Privacy Trainwreck": Exposure, Invasion, and Drama
Posted by danah boyd
Last night, i asked will Facebook learn from its mistake? In the first paragraph, i alluded to a “privacy trainwreck” and then went on to briefly highlight the political actions that were taking place. I never returned to why i labeled it that way and in my coarseness, i failed to properly convey what i meant by this.
When i sat down to explain the significance of the “privacy trainwreck,” a full-length essay came out. Rather than make you read this essay in blog form (or via your RSS reader), i partitioned it off to a printable webpage.
Facebook’s “Privacy Trainwreck”: Exposure, Invasion, and Drama
The key points that i make in this essay are:
- Privacy is an experience that people have, not a state of data.
- The ickyness that people feel when they panic about privacy comes from the experience of exposure or invasion.
- We’ve experienced the exposure hiccup before with Cobot. When are we going to learn?
- Invasion changes social reality and there is a cognitive cap to being able to handle it.
- Does invasion potentially result in a weakening of meaningful social ties?
- Facebook lost its innocence this week.
Please enjoy this essay and forward it on to both technology folks and Facebook participants. I would like to hear feedback!
Comments (5)
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1. Robert on September 9, 2006 1:15 AM writes...
Facebook lost its innocence a LONG TIME AGO. The 'limited profile' is a band-aid that doesn't cover. One can easily get around even blocks by simply finding a person through a friend and viewing their page that way. What a joke. Suppose you had different friends, some from college and some from church. In the college pics, you're at a wild party. Guess what? If you add your church friends, they can find out easily. Even if you put them on 'limited profile.' True, maybe they won't notice. But the next time you see them, you have to wonder. Facebook is not just the loss of privacy but of peace of mind.
Permalink to Comment2. Kyle on September 9, 2006 2:42 AM writes...
That's not totally true, Robert. If you change your privacy settings so that only people who are your friends can see your profile, then it doesn't matter if people can find your name or not--they still can't see your profile unless they are a friend.
This facebook protest has had two points:
1. It's opened the eyes of those of us who post things online to issues of privacy. Before this week, news stories were always about "parents, this is how to protect your kids." this week it was "why are kids suddenly concerned?"
2. It's shown the power of facebook and online networking as a means to get information across quickly, and organize faster than ever before.
I agree with the bullet points made in the article above. Those are key issues as to why it got so intense.
I thank the folks at facebook for spending what must have been 2 days without sleep making fixes to the site. The thing is, it still does not give you power over everythign on the feed. There is still no control over your blog posts being published, your changes in relationship status (single, engaged, no longer in a relationship), or specific updates to your basic info. Either way, thanks to you guys who worked hard and tried to listen to everyone's complaints.
Permalink to Comment3. Brian O' Hanlon on September 10, 2006 2:27 PM writes...
Had a weird kinda experience this week, reading Friedman's The World is Flat.
It is rare in the book, that Friedman admits to the flat world having it's problems, but when he does, he normally adds a suggestion:
Can someone please fix this.
Friedman had most of his book, posted up in some yahoo account or something. It made sense, secure, always available, as he had to travel around world, and worried about laptops getting misplaced etc, etc.
Anyhow, in the course of his research, he heard of an American soldier who had written a diary on a yahoo account or something. Then, when the soldier died, his own parents couldn't access the account. Thomas himself realised, that if he had died, his family too, would have to sue the web company, to get the rights to reclaim his book transcript.
It is not just about privacy - there is the other side of the coin too. Namely, the web gobbling up stuff, so nobody can access it.
B.
Permalink to Comment4. Phil on September 12, 2006 3:58 AM writes...
Thanks, danah - I think you've made some quite important points about what online sociality is, and (more importantly) what it isn't. Apart from anything else, it's rare to see anyone admit to online interaction making them feel weird
Permalink to Comment5. Phil on September 12, 2006 4:10 AM writes...
[Damn - I thought I hit 'Preview'. Continuing...]
- not angry, not real-world-scared, just sort of vulnerable and spooked and, well, 'icky'. I'm sure it's a common experience, particularly now that we're all interacting on the open prairie of the Web rather than the corrals of mailing lists and Usenet.
I think there's a level of online interaction which isn't social networking at all - and I mean a fundamental level, a substrate. A big part of what's going on, I'd argue, is a kind of public fantasy - or rather, millions of overlapping and partially-shared public fantasies. (This is just as true for people like me, who anchor everything they do online to their real-world identity, as for pseudonymous RPGers; it's just true in a different way.) Not so much imaginary friends as imaginary friendships with real people. And when your fantasies start answering back - that's spooky.
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