The right to privacy is something all of us assume we have. At least, I know I did, until I started looking closer at the digital choices we make through the context of this class. Now I wonder exactly what privacy is, especially after pondering this week’s reading assignments. danah boyd and Alice Marwick both point out that there’s no crystal clear definition of what privacy is. Does it involve more than just what people do or do not know about you and your life? That’s just one of the key questions I think we all need to consider.
In Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck, boyd (2008) discusses the launch of the news feed feature on Facebook and the concerns people had about exposure and invasion of privacy. In aggregating the information displayed for Facebook users to see on the news feed, already public information was made more visible and easily accessible. However, boyd says that, “privacy is not simply about the state of an inanimate object or set of bytes; it is about the sense of vulnerability that an individual experiences when negotiating data” (p. 14). What the news feed did was take previously obscure and discreet information online and put it at the forefront of every user’s accessibility, in a neat chronological format.
The recent introduction of Facebook’s timeline has chronologically organized all the information we’ve ever posted or disclosed as long as we’ve had an active Facebook account. It is unnerving to know that it is so fast and easy to go back and look at posts from 2005 or 2006. That was a time when my friends and I certainly understood less about the consequences of what you post online for others to see. I did think it was funny that boyd mentioned initial news feeds showing updates from all “Friends” and not just those we deem to be close to us, since we now can in fact distinguish “close friends” from “acquaintances” when trying to filter information on Facebook.
boyd and Marwick (2011) also examined how teens perceive and try to achieve social privacy. They discuss how privacy “is related more to agency and the ability to control a situation than particular properties of information” (p. 2). boyd (2008) also states that privacy is “a sense of control over information, the context where sharing takes place, and the audience who can gain access” (p. 18). More and more, teens and adults are finding out that what we thought was a controlled, private interaction may be anything but that.
We’ve already talked about how platforms like Facebook and Google package our media consumption information and browsing habits to sell to advertisers and other third parties. We’ve also discussed how the FBI is finding ways to mine our social networks for information about us. And we’ve even discovered that Facebook can in many instances access our text messages, as they’re in the process of developing their own messaging service. Just recently Google was able to bypass the privacy settings on the Safari browser to track people’s web browsing without consent. Where does it end? Will it end?
Should we blame Facebook? Or are we to blame because we exposed too much personal information? I have a friend who laughed when I told her Dan Gillmor said he believed Facebook is one of the most dangerous companies on the planet … until her account was accessed by someone else, prompting her to deactivate. Of course, we now know that deactivating doesn’t mean any of your information or content actually goes away. I think there was a time not long ago where I might have laughed at that statement too. However, I now find myself more and more wary about things like where I “check in” at and what sites and apps I link to through my Facebook page.
The premise behind Facebook and other social networking sites is to make it easy for people to “get connected” or to “re-connect.” But at what cost? Some people use social networks to make important business and personal contacts. There are also cases where employers warn employees about what they can and cannot say. And they monitor the activities of their employees. We might to be inclined toward outrage at the thought of companies asking for Facebook passwords, but we’d be silly not to recognize that employers checking social networking profiles today is nearly as standard as performing a criminal/background or credit check. Social networking sites are also linked to different kinds of stalking and identity theft.
Does the loss of privacy make the cost of social networking too steep? Or can we find ways to strike a balance? Those are just some of the questions that are ripe with research possibilities that we’ll have to try to answer. And I think we’d all be wise to think of privacy now in terms of being a privilege, rather than a right, to protect both “socially” and “structurally” as boyd (2008)
suggests.
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