A Quintet of Facebook Privacy Stories
It’s common to hear that Facebook use means that privacy is over, or no longer matters. I think that perception is deeply wrong. It’s based in the superficial notion that people making different or perhaps surprising privacy tradeoffs are never aware of what they’re doing, or that they have no regrets.
Some recent stories that I think come together to tell a meta-story of privacy:
- Steven Levy tweeted: “What surprised me most in my Zuck interview [link to http://www.wired.com/magazine/2013/04/facebookqa/ no longer works]: he says the thing most on rise is ‘sharing with smaller groups.'” (Tweet edited from 140-speak). I think that sharing with smaller groups is a pretty clear expression that privacy matters to Facebook users, and that as Facebook becomes more a part of people’s lives, the way they use it will continue to mature. For example, it turns out:
- “71% of Facebook Users Engage in ‘Self-Censorship’” did a study of people typing into the Facebook status box, and not hitting post. In part this may be because people are ‘internalizing the policeman’ that Facebook imposes:
- “Facebook’s Online Speech Rules Keep Users On A Tight Leash.” This isn’t directly a privacy story, but one important facet of privacy is our ability to explore unpopular ideas. If our ability to do so in the forum in which people talk to each other is inhibited by private contract and opaque rules, then our ability to explore and grow in the privacy which Facebook affords to conversations is inhibited.
- Om Malik: “Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy” An interesting perspective, but Facebook users still care about privacy, but will have trouble articulating how or taking action to preserve the values of privacy they care about.