Privacy on Facebook

I have been asked to comment on Facebook quite a bit recently. This isn't too surprising, given the popularity of the social networking website and the rate of growth it is experiencing. A frequent question people have is about the invasion of privacy that it represents. Inflammatory words, like "stalking," are tossed around with impunity. In this article I'd like to investigate the reality of those claims and consider the validity of the use of strong language like "stalking."

A guy I know, his face blurred for privacy reasons.

Privacy, the dictionary tells us, is "the state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people." How would your privacy be invaded on a social networking site like Facebook? On the face of it (ahem), pretty easily.

In terms of observation, anyone who you acknowledge as a friend can see quite a lot about you - your profile, your picture, your status updates, what groups you join. You can also be observed by people who aren't your friends but are part of the network you are in. Facebook is built on the concept of "networks," which in the first few months consisted solely of universities and colleges but has recently (September 2006) expanded to regional (geographic) and institutional (companies) networks.

Sounds pretty scary, doesn't it? Sounds like an invasion of privacy, doesn't it? To reach that conclusion, however, you have to miss out on a key fact. The information that you find on Facebook about yourself is, for the most part, put there by you. That's right. Facebook isn't a collection of facts from other sources but instead it is a profile that you construct yourself and you choose to put into the system. In fact, there is almost nothing on the site that you don't place there and even that information is subject to pretty fine-grained privacy controls. Facebook is a place to publicize things about yourself. That is what it is all about. If you don't want people to know something, why would you put there in the first place, since the entire premise of the site is to share information about yourself with others?

I think some people just "get" this without having to have it explained to them. Young people, especially, see information about themselves as a projection of their personality and something that they trade in, just like they would not object to you knowing what kind of hat or shoes they were wearing if they met you in the street. Other people, however, somehow misunderstand the essence of social networking sites and assume that information about themselves is somehow going into the site without their knowledge and going out to people they don't know. That isn't happening - the only information Facebook has about you is that which you type in yourself and if you don't want to share it, don't put it onto the internet in the first place.

There is one exception to this bit of advice. Facebook photos - and to some extent other elements of the site - can be "tagged" with your name by other people and in this way there is information leakage going on. Suppose a person that you know vaguely, from your school or organization, takes a picture at a party and posts it to their Facebook photos page. They, or some other person in your network, could "tag" you as being in the photo. In this case information about you - that you were at that party, that you were doing something there - is present without your knowledge. At least for a while.

Just like the internet can both spread hoaxes and be used to spread information debunking those hoaxes (see http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/), you can use Facebook to monitor how your name is being spread just as fast as others might use it to spread that information. In this case, you can use the "Photos of you" feature to find those pictures and ask the person to remove you if you don't want to be seen. The pictures were almost certainly put up there by someone in your network of friends, and thus they are very likely to remove the pictures if asked.

I would argue that it is not - in most cases - sensible to talk about an invasion of privacy when the information is placed into the system by yourself, and you have a great deal of control who sees it in any case. Although some people might not be clear on the concept, a social networking site is all about publicizing, not hiding, information about yourself. If you don't want to do that, you shouldn't be there, or if you don't want some things to be public, even in the limited definition of public in the sense of your friends and your local network, you shouldn't put them onto the site.

As for the use of the term "stalking," I think this is particularly unfortunate. To do so is to dilute the notion of stalking and take a serious - and criminal - activity and water it down to something that is not only entirely legal but mundane and in fact the whole premise of social networking software. When we water down our language by indiscriminately using a powerful word for a weak situation we hurt the language by removing specificity and precision and, more importantly, we hurt those who have actually been subjected to that phenomenon by trivializing their experience. You might think that you've "spiced up" your commentary by calling browsing through Facebook "stalking" but I would argue that all you've done is demonstrate that you don't care for language, that you don't care for people who really are stalked, and that you like a cheap win at the expense of others. Nobody wins.

Update: This post, like so much else that I "import" to the notes feature on Facebook, has taken on a new life there. If you're a member of Facebook, you may be able to view it (who knows what people can see and what they can't any more... it is too confusing... here is the link, anyway: http://sfu.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=2402161531&ref=nf