Facebook: Is social networking the end to privacy?
By Kate Austin
12/1/08
College students are busy. With the demands of schoolwork, internships, a job on the side and the need to have a social life, the social networking site Facebook provides a seemingly simple way to keep in touch. But are students taking enough precautions to protect their cyber identity?
Social networking sites have created a world where one can choose how others see them. The details one writes about himself and his life, with photographs and videos posted combine to form ones online identity. Many students say this is their reason for joining Facebook.
Certain privacy concerns have been debated and addressed. In a question-and-answer session with Times Online and Chris Kelly, the chief privacy officer for Facebook, Kelly said there is a lot of misunderstanding about the way the site is operated in regards to privacy.
“We’ve had a lot more rules in place and a lot more controls in place than I think we’ve generally got credit for,” Kelly said. “We’ve always had reporting links in place for people to say ‘this person shouldn’t be a member of this network,’ for example a high-school network, and we do regularly remove people for that.”
Even with the controls and rules Kelly mentioned, according to Facebook’s own figures, only 25 percent of its users have bothered to use existing privacy settings.
Facebook, which used to only be available for those with a school e-mail address, is now is easily accessible to the general public, creating more privacy concerns. Although there are certain privacy settings that a user may customize on the site, it is difficult to know exactly what someone in the Internet world can see on one’s personal site.
Friend of a friend
“Our reputations are important to us,” says the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s Senior Communications Advisor Heather Ormerod. “As individuals, whether we like it or not, what other people think about us affects us and can inform how others act towards us. Once an individual posts personal information on the Internet, it becomes impossible to control that information. Personal information posted to these kinds of sites often winds up being used in unexpected ways.”
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada created a video to explain where information on social networking sites can end up.
It is not only friends of a friend but employers, advertisers and anyone else who may be collecting data through the third-part nature of Facebook who can access and use ones personal information
“I put up information about myself on Facebook so that people can see what kind of person I am and so that they will see what I like,” said Lauren Merrill, a student at Elon University. “I don’t really worry about what employers will think. I have some old teachers on there that I worry about but then I just think, ‘Who cares?’ I won’t have to face them again.”
“People need to understand that once their information is on the Internet, they can never really get it back,” Ormerod said. “It can be passed from user to user, it can be easily used without permission by other parties and, sadly, there are many, many people out there who recognize the value of personal information and are finding ways to get it and use it for their own purposes.”
Once you get in, you can’t get out
“I got sick of everyone knowing my business and thinking that they could constantly be in touch with me,” said Seth Powsner, a junior at SUNY Purchase. “I tried to take down my Facebook page last year, but all I could do was deactivate it. Since I ended up putting my page back up this year it wasn’t really a problem, but it’s scary to think that Facebook is that difficult to leave.”
Within Facebook there is an option to “deactivate” your account, but the bottom of the deactivation page reads, “You can reactivate your account at any time by logging in with your email and password,” meaning the content of your page will still remain somewhere in the site.
“You may remove your user content from the site at any time,” Facebook’s user content says, but also that “you acknowledge that the company may retain archived copies of your user content.”
“This is arguably a privacy issue,” said Elon alum Michele Hammerbacher. “One side could argue that since your profile/information was available on Facebook in the first place, then you shouldn’t have a problem with people accessing it at a later time. The other side, however, could argue that you deactivated your account for a reason and are expecting all parts of your profile be deleted. Privacy and the Internet is always a gray area, and this example is no different.”
Because “Facebook users may modify or delete any of their profile information at any time by logging into their account,” according the Facebook’s privacy policy, the only way to remove all your information from the site is to delete every single friend, wall post, picture, comment, video and tag one by one.
Employers on the Web
What happens when students begin applying for jobs and are unable to remove user content from the Web? Can potential employers use things that students have posted throughout college against them?
“Would-be employers, bosses, parents, teachers, university administrators and others are using social networking sites to check up on people,” said Ormerod. “This is coming as a surprise to people who assume that what they post is private. People have been fired, missed out on job interviews and academic opportunities, and been suspended from school for instant messages, wall posts and other messages they mistakenly thought were like private conversations with friends.”
Elon University students who participated in an informal survey were not overly concerned with what future employers may be able to see on their Facebook profile.
Many students said that when the time comes for them to start looking for a serious job that they will remove or de-tag pictures and edit wall-posts that may not be workplace appropriate.
“If I were applying for my dream job I might take down some pictures or put my Facebook on hiatus,” said junior Katie Roberts.
Others decided to take minor precautions to prevent employers from easily seeing pictures that may lead to trouble.
“I tried to take precautionary measures by either de-tagging inappropriate pictures of myself or by only letting people I am friends with see my pictures,” said Elon alumni Evan Broderick.
Weekend blog to workplace job-loss
“As employees, we need to be mindful of our obligations to our organizations when we comment on online blogs or post information on our profiles,” said Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart in an address to the employees off the Bank of Canada. “What we say online – even on a Saturday or Sunday – can have implications in the workplace.”
Choosing the publicly accessible Internet as an outlet for free speech can create issues. In a specific case, several employees of the company Farm Boy in Ottawa have been fired because of things they wrote on a group wall, which was not supposed available to the general public.
“We already have an English word to describe being fired for an online activity,” said Stoddart. “The Macmillan English dictionary defines the word ‘dooced’ as ‘having lost your job because of something you have put in an Internet blog.’ The term was coined by a Los Angeles web designer who lost her job after writing about work colleagues in her personal blog.”
No one likes change
With each development of a new Facebook feature, such as the news-feed, the Beacon feature and allowing the general public to join, there was uproar of user complaints.
The news-feed published almost every action that a user took within Facebook on the main Facebook page that every user sees when they log in. There was no longer a way to discreetly alter your status, user information or relationship status. If you became Facebook friends with someone or commented on a picture, all your friends and even people who were not your friends were notified.
Users, although willing to post all kinds of information about themselves on a public site, were not willing to have their actions broadcasted to all of Facebook. As a result of petitions and other complaints, Facebook provided its users with the mini-feed or news-feed option. Although there is still no way to fully remove oneself from the mini-feed, Facebook executives did try to listen to the public.
Enjoying the life of the birdwatcher’s bird
Clearly a majority of Facebook and other social networking site users are not very concerned with privacy. Users now seem to enjoy being watched; constant status updates on Facebook and blogging sites like Twitter create a world where one can inform people of their every move.
“[We have] social networking sites that let you update your “status”, enabling you to let people know what you are doing as often as you like,” wrote Kristen Yates in an article “Do you enjoy being watched?” for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
“Because we enjoy these activities, and because some of them bring us pleasure, [Hal] Niedzviecki [author of a new article on surveillance in The Walrus] makes the argument that we actually enjoy being watched,” Yates wrote.
Kate Austin: Journalism On-the-go 