Facebook isn't dangerous - it's just different

Brett, I was kinda with you most of the way, until the last paragraph.  I especially like your reminder that Facebook is not mission critical. Yet when you say "we have to get used to a different level of privacy, openness and communication" I beg to differ.

Facebook is the way it is precisely because Zuckerberg set out to design a vast collector of personal network information, with the intent of capitalising on it. When it was revealed recently that he called early FB users "dumb fucks" for trusting him, the more important revelation was that also he told his colleague, 'if you ever need to know anything about anyone at Harvard, just ask me'. I found that quite chilling.

Yes indeed FB is top fun, and it need not be dangerous if users are self conscious and wary.  However, I don't think we should let FB off the hook for being (a) wanton pirates of personal information, and (b) probably deliberate in the way they manipulate privacy norms.  When Zuckerberg and others assert that privacy is changing, their self-serving edicts are based on a scant few years experience of a biased selection of a risk-taking cohort.  It's just too soon for the FB experience to tell us how privacy attitudes in society at large are changing. 

We don't let adolescent males set road safety policy and we shouldn't let them make privacy policy either.

I am myself extremely wary of the idea that privacy and utility/participation has to involve a tradeoff.  My experience as a privacy professional is that whenever someone says 'privacy is dead' or words to that effect, they are actually trying to sell something, be it new sneakers because a retailer detected via Foursquare that I go to the gym a lot, or national security ideology and airport body scanners. 

Why should privacy and utility be fundamentally at odds?  Why should online social networks necessarily provide an eye-in-the-sky for their operators to collect information at will about their members?  If it wasn't for the underlying profit motive, OSNs could easily be designed with privacy as the cautious default, and "exhibitionism" as the hard-to-reach option.

And so, because I view FB as a business more than a social phenomenon (much less a well designed experiment), I have to discount claims arising from this specially selected population, that Gen Y and Digital Natives are in general more relaxed about security and privacy. I am not sure about that at all.

Cheers,

Stephen Wilson.

Stephen,

Valid points. When I said we need to get used to different levels of privacy - I literally mean different levels. I don't think there is a one size fits all approach.

On the Y-Gen/Digital Natives question - I firmly believe this. Look at the issue of 'sexting' as an example of how their sensibilities in this respect are changing.

I guess you're leading to the issue of Identity theft. I think we have to come up with better ways of managing our critical identity than relying on privacy policy. Biometrics is one way, but so could be effective registers. The fact is, that relying on privacy policy or even educating consumers, is not going to be effective in the long run in protecting our online identity. 

We need to innovate privacy and identity management just like we are social media.

BK

I recently stumbled upon the following articles which may be of interest to this discussion:

Kurt Opsahl (2010) Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline

Matt McKeon (2010) The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Brett,

Yes, I agree there is no one-size-fits-all, so the idea of different privacy settings (plural) is an important one.  Lots and lots of fascinating research is yet to be done on how to create usable privacy GUIs.

On the other hand we might agree to disagree over privacy and the young.  I worry that sexting and the like are results of youthful exhuberance coupled with seductive, fun, prestigious technology, exacerbated by the developmental problem that the frontal cortex might not be able to properly compute risk until age 25 or so.  Accordingly, youthful OSN users may need to be protected from themselves. 

But there is another famous test about Gen Y attitudes to privacy: Barge into a teenager's bedroom unannounced and watch how they reflexively protect their privacy!  So it comes back to control.  I think almost everyone at all ages actually cherishe their ability to control what is known about them.  If some people on OSNs seem to have abandoned their inhibitions, we may need to discount this to some extent because they simply might not fully comprehend what they're doing, because they're young, and/or because the OSN privacy configuration is so opaque.

Cheers,

SW.

Steve,

Suggests that there is a divided between the digital persona and the person?

BK

Brett,

You've hit on a pet topic of mine ;-)

I believe there is definitely an important divide between the digital persona and the person.  In real life we exercise a portfiolio of identities, and we should do so online as well.  Except that lots of the newer identity frameworks seem to overlook the importance of having separable independent digital identities.  Biometrics too is a worrying technology because it can remove user discretion and jam all digital personae together.

It's not an academic idea that digital identities are real and separate from the 'true' biological identity.  Two examples.  First, my corporate bank account is legally different from my personal bank account, so my digital identity when I bank online for my business has to be kept separate.  Second, the exciting new field of medical social networking, where for example there are findings that mental health patients may enjoy better clinical results from online psychological counselling compared with face-to-face.  One factor may be that patients deliberately adopt a sort of disarmed digital persona making them more amenable to therapy; if so, this surely demands the greatest care be taken separating digital identity from biological.

Some of my more detailed thoughts are set out in a one page paper Introducing Identity Plurality.

Cheers,

Steve.