A Modest Construct
It's all bullshit and it's bad for you
Unreasonable expectations of privacy
6 September 2006 • TechCrunch has more about Facebook’s response, as well as yet another debunking of the common claim that the new features are somehow an invasion of privacy.
Facebook, a popular social networking site that manages to be less excremental than MySpace only due to its exclusivity, rolled out changes this morning that have users in an uproar.
The latest feature is “feeds,” an area that aggregates all the latest invitations and activities of either individual users (on the respective user’s page), or of all one’s ‘friends’ (on a user’s private panel). Mind you, all this new feature does is aggregate previously-accessible information. Users complain that “stalking is supposed to be hard” as if that’s really an issue.
Listen, Facebook is trite and stupid, yes, but it’s no MySpace: it’s not haunted by desperate 40-year-old men looking for 12-year-old ass. You have to have a valid university e-mail to sign up, and you can set pretty stringent privacy measures that lets only your chosen friends see anything about you. The problem here is twofold:
- Users practice little or no discrimination when it comes to “friending” people: likely, most people have plenty of “friends” who are not really friends at all, and it’s likely these only-vaguely related third parties who are the cause of this uproar. I don’t care if Billy and Suzie can see at a glanced who I’ve recently broken up with or what invitation I’ve declined, but I’ll be damned if Joe Shmoe should be able to see it.
- Even with true “friends,” in Facebook, users have an unrealistic expectation of privacy. Case in point: idiots who post picture of them drinking illegally who are surprised when they face disciplinary action because their RA saw it. Well, duh, you moron: it’s on Facebook, and you friended your RA. Now all six billion of your ‘friends’ can, with just a few clicks, see a pictoral narrative of you getting thrashed on Pabst Blue Ribbon and engaging in drunkenly sexual innuendo with your roommate.
I can see where Facebook can be a handy tool and not simply a circle-jerk for extroverts, so it would be glib of me to say “If you don’t like it, just cancel your account,” but I will say, as someone who’s always been very cautious of his privacy, that you should never assume that anything you put on the internet is “private” in any meaningful sense of the word—not in an anonymous blog, not in a forum, and most certainly not in a sort-of-public social networking site based on given names. If you don’t like people being able to see your “feed,” then you need fewer friends, stricter privacy, or just less sensitive information sitting on your profile page. Duh.
Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 23:45
I don’t think revealing less information or befriending fewer people would really solve the problem as many Facebook users see it. The issue is precisely that what is being revealed cannot be altered with a couple strokes of the backspace key, as the new feeds log users’ actions. This means that now one is judged by one’s actions on Facebook, which seems to indicate that Facebook’s engineers have forgotten that the anonymity of action is what spurred the growth of online communities. It flies in the face of the idea of controlled identity, and that’s why users are upset. They want their real names, their beer pictures, their stupid comments, because those are the results of careful, though rather inane, calculation of social presentation. The fact that they can now be tracked as they tromp around Facebook makes them feel suddenly naked in the brush. It removes the wonder and mystery of digital life, dragging it down into boring metaphors of physical constraint.
Perhaps, but if these people really believed that having these items aggregated is the difference between privacy and a violation of privacy, then they’re dumber than I thought.
Not that it matters—I think these changes will be rolled back soon, anyway. The members have spoken.