Fatima Shaikh3/12/2015

Bus, Govt & SocietyTaylor

The Death of Privacy?

Facebook and Privacy in our Changing World

In 2010, Mark Zuckerburg, Eric Schmidt, and Steve Jobs declared

privacy dead (Weinstein). These are three major players in the shaping of

our world- Eric Schmidt is the past CEO of Google, Steve Jobs is the late CEO

of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook- so it proves worthy to

glean some insights into their declaration.

For those who may be unaware, Facebook is the popular social media

site launched in the year 2004. Lack of privacy is an issue that has hounded

Facebook and there has been controversy over Facebook’s privacy practices.

In fact, Facebook could be considered anti-privacy if you consider a

statement of Zuckerberg’s: that Facebook is designed to increase the

efficiency and transparency of communication (Baloun 2007, Smith 2008).

This can mean full disclosure of a user’s activities to everyone on their

friend’s list. The site’s Terms of Service say that people must use their real

names, information and identities and only use the service to connect with

“real world contacts” (Arrington 2008). Personal information and a user’s

activities are stored in something that is basically a large database, where

the information can be “analyzed, manipulated, systematized, formalized,

classified and aggregated” (Raynes-Goldie 2010). Companies analyze every

word and every click of Facebook users (Westin 2013). If you see how much

users post on their wall, you begin to wonder if these users care at all about

privacy. And consider how many users Facebook has: 1.19 billion monthly

active users, 874 million mobile users, and 728 million daily users (Google);

this is a lot of people who seem to not care about their privacy! However,

according to Acquisti and Ralph Gross’s 2006 study (which looked at

university-aged Facebook users) even though Facebook users shared

personal information, they still felt that privacy was a very important issue-

even more important than terrorism (Raynes-Goldie 2010)!. What does this

mean? Do users care or not care about privacy?

Let us explore the question.

In January 2008, Kate Raynes-Goldie conducted a year-long

ethnographic study of a small group of socially connected 20-somethings in

Toronto, Canada. At the time, this area had the second largest regional

Facebook network. Surprisingly, all participants of the study mentioned

privacy concerns on Facebook. However, these users were not concerned

with institutional privacy-such as what Facebook as a company or its

partners might do with their personal information- they were concerned with

social privacy. Social privacy means they were concerned with controlling

access to their personal information from other users rather than Facebook

or its partners.

Raynes-Goldie’s study participants had many privacy concerns on

Facebook. They were worried about things like how to handle an

“inappropriate friend request” from a boss or a student they were teaching.

The individuals in the study worried about unwanted people finding them

and contacting them. A boss might see pictures of social friends that the

individual doesn’t want him/her to see. Participants were worried about the

lack of control they had over the information shown on their walls and the

photos that they were identified or “tagged” in. Hearing this, some

individuals may be quick to point out Facebook’s privacy features, but these

features are complicated and don’t allow pre-screening friends’ comments or

stopping others from tagging them in pictures. One individual complained

how when he joined new regional networks Facebook would automatically

set all his photos to be shared with everyone in the network.

Raynes-Goldie also discovered that individuals have found ways to go

around the privacy issues of Facebook. Some individuals in the study use

aliases, even though that is against Facebook’s Terms of Service. Some

individuals in the study also delete wall posts and photo tags on a regular

basis, but it can be time-consuming because it has to be done manually.

Social privacy is not new. It is part of a more broad definition that

includes expressive and informational privacy (Raynes Goldie). DeCew

defines informational privacy as the protection of personal information

relating to daily activities, finances and lifestyle. DeCew defines expressive

privacy as the desire to protect oneself from the influence of peer pressure

or ridicule and to be free to express one’s own identity and it is the ability to

control what is said about you. If informational privacy is violated, so is

expressive privacy. Facebook violates both informational and expressive

privacy because it turns all self-expression and communication on the site

into information which is stored in a database that can store and reproduce

its information. Raynes-Goldie says that her participants were concerned

with how, when, and who could see their personal information that they had

provided, comments others left on their walls or photos they had been

tagged in.

Social privacy has changed over time. Pre-Facebook-from the late

1970s until recently-privacy was largely understood to be as informational

and institutional. This means that people of this time, when asked about

privacy, would say something about how governments, banks and other

businesses use their personal information (Raynes-Goldie).

Raynes-Goldie found that privacy pragmatism explains how Facebook

users still use Facebook even though users worried about social privacy. By

2003, people who are concerned about their privacy but willing to trade

some of it for something beneficial had risen by 10 percent to 64 percent of

those surveyed (Taylor 2003). This is what Raynes-Goldie found in her study-

that Facebook users still use Facebook because they are willing to trade

some of their privacy for gaining some benefits of the site. The amount of

people who take this stance is substantial (64% by 2003 (Taylor 2003)). This

shift towards “privacy pragmatism” was reflected in Raynes-Goldie’s findings

with her Toronto, Canada’s participants, as well as in Zeynep Tufecki’s 2008

study of university–age Facebook and MySpace users in the United States.

Having a Facebook account is not without coercion. It is very important

to one’s social life to be on the site. Facebook is replacing phone and email

as the preferred way to interact, and is more and more vital as a way to keep

in touch with friends and family. However, this is not without costs and many

people who abstain from Facebook feel more and more left out. There is

much pressure to be on Facebook as it permeates our lives, and the era of

Facebook has forever changed the issue of privacy (Raynes-Goldie 2010).

So is privacy dead? I would think not; it is alive and more critical to

consider than ever. It is important to realize that it would be to Facebook’s

advantage to have less privacy or if privacy was dead because that would

mean the flourishing of Facebook. To this end, Zuckerberg has made it

difficult to be private on Facebook and periodically pushes people to be more

open about their information. This is because it is to Facebook’s benefit since

a lack of privacy would mean more sharing and posting on Facebook which

would mean more ad revenue, other forms of monetization such as selling of

information, and a bigger entrenchment and visibility of Facebook in daily

life.

Why is the privacy issue so critical for Facebook? It is important to note

that privacy pragmatists are simply giving up some privacy for the benefits

of the Facebook site. If they do not perceive the benefits to outweigh the

costs of the privacy they give up, they will not relinquish some of their

privacy. Also, the younger generation is overwhelmingly becoming privacy

pragmatists (Raynes-Goldie 2010).

So what should Facebook do if they wanted to do something about

their users’ privacy concerns? I would make sure that the benefits always

outweigh the costs of being on the site. I would look into more about how

people perceive privacy psychologically, which is partially done through this

paper. I would also research tactics to get users to open up more because

this issue is so central to Facebook’s success. I would advise Facebook to

take a more gentle, subtle way of pushing people to open up more rather

than scaring them of each new “transgression” into users’ privacy

(psychological tactics would be important for this). I would take users’

privacy concerns into consideration in a respectful way. I would make the

privacy features simpler, intuitive, and easy to use. These are critical moves

because privacy will become a bigger and bigger issue in the future (Taylor

2015) and if Facebook takes proactive steps now they can prevent any

mishaps that would be harmful for the company down the road.

References

Acquisti, Alessandro and Ralph Gross, 2006. “Imagined communities:

Awareness,

information sharing, and privacy on the Facebook,” Privacy Enhancing

Technologies (PET) Workshop, pp. 36–58; version at

http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/projects/facebook/facebook2.pd

f, accessed 12 March 2015.

Arrington, Michael. 2008. “Facebook isn’t a social network. And stop trying to

make new friends there” (15 September), at

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/15/facebook-isnt-a-social-

network-and-dont-try-to-make-new-friends-there/, accessed 12 March

2015.

Baloun, Karel M. (2007) Inside Facebook: Life, work and visions of greatness.

Victoria, B.C.: Trafford.

DeCew. Judith Wagner. 1997. In pursuit of privacy: Law, ethics, and the rise

of technology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Google Search Engine response.

https://www.google.com/search?

q=how+many+users+does+facebook+have&oq=how+many+users+

does+facebook+have&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j0l5.12708j0j7&sourceid=c

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Raynes-Goldie, K. (2010, January 1). Aliases, creeping, and wall cleaning:

Understanding privacy in the age of Facebook. Retrieved March 12,

2015, from

http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2775/2432

Smith, Justin. (2008). “Live notes from Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at F8

Developer

Conference,” Retrieved March 12, 2015.

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/07/23/live-notes-from-mark-

zuckerbergs-keynote-at-f8-developer-conference/

Taylor, Glen. 2015. Lecture Business, Government and Society.

Taylor, Humphrey. 2003. “Most people are ‘privacy pragmatists’ who, while

concerned about privacy, will sometimes trade it off for other

benefits,” Retrieved 12 March 2015.

at http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=365,

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