Social network privacy
The issue of privacy in Facebook and other social networks is not a new one. The Chronicle of Higher Education, the “No. 1 source of news, information, and jobs for [American] college and university faculty members and administrators”, published various articles on the issue (unfortunately I could not access them because you need an account, and at the moment I am not going to spend money on it. But they are there, if you are interested). Personally I am not worried about the issue at the moment, because in my Facebook account I do not put any real information of any kind. I use it only to keep in touch with one or two people around the world), but I still found it an important aspect of social networking, and therefore affecting the use we will make of internet in the future.
dana boyd talks about Putting Privacy Settings in the Context of Use (you can read it en français, if you prefer), saying that “Facebook’s privacy settings are the most flexible and the most confusing privacy settings in the industry” and advocating for putting privacy information “into the context of the content itself”. The problem is that managing settings once-and-for-all in the abstract does not solve the problem. That is why she asked for a different approach:
Why are privacy settings still an abstract process removed from the context of the content itself? Privacy settings shouldn’t just be about control; they should be about the combination of awareness, context, and control. You should understand the visibility of an act during the moment of the act itself and whenever you are accessing the tracings of the act.
Tech developers… I implore you… put privacy information into the context of the content itself.
The point is that there is a need to learn how to use internet tools (and new media in general) not only in a step-by-step, instrumental manner, but also in order to acquire awareness of the consequences and the meaning of what you are doing. The best way to bring attention to the issue of privacy and the fact that you should be in control of what you show and to whom is, in fact, to actually doing it while you are adding pictures, descriptions, narrations, that is to say expressing yourself to other people, that is to say in the context and at the very moment in which you are doing it. And, even if it might be true that students will not take advantage of this kind of tool (I read it in one of the comments), I definitely will. Actually I can say that it will be the only way to convince me to put things on Facebook.
Michael Zimmer wrote about this issue in various occasions, drafting a how-to instruction sheet on Facebook privacy settings and a Bibliography of scholarship on privacy and web search engines. He also announced a conference on Privacy in Social Network Sites (unfortunately it took place yesterday and today in Delft).
If you are as worried as I am about this issue, or for some other reasons, interested in the topics, you can be interested in one or more of this books:
- Nikita Borisov-Ian Goldberg (eds) Privacy Enhancing Technologies: Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium (Leuven, Belgium, July 23-25, 2008)
- Daniel J. Solove, The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, Yale University Press
- Daniel Solove, The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age, New York University Press
- John Palfrey-Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, Basic Books
- John L. Mills, Privacy: The Lost Right, Oxford University Press
- John R. Levine, Internet Privacy for Dummies
Or have a look at John Levine blog, Internet and e-mail policy and practice
Alexandre Said,
October 25, 2008 @ %I:%M %p
Nice emphasis on the fact that “The Chronicle” is U.S.-centric. Some of our colleagues seem not to notice that this can be an issue.
About privacy, one of the main things I notice, is that people use a variety of practises and are typically less oblivious to the issue than journalists, using survey results, give them credit for. This is especially the case with younger users who are typically represented as naïve even though they often have very insightful things to say about their use of social networks. If you take into account that the world in which they’ll live most of their future lives will give even more importance to “networking” than the world in which we’ve lived, the diverse strategies used by younger users (including radical transparency) seem less irrational than what journalists have been claiming for the past two years. Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a danger. Identity theft is a real threat, especially in economic contexts based on the credit card. Problem is at this point, anybody’s privacy can be breached somewhat easily. According to some, there’s even a glut in the availability of personal data, driving prices down. Somebody’s credit card number isn’t worth as much as it has been before because so many numbers can readily be purchased.