Are you in a relationship? What are your political views? Where did you go for breakfast this morning?
What would once have been details of our lives known only by those we know and trust, many of us now willingly display online.
From the surveillance entertainment of Big Brother to closed-circuit TV and celebrity magazines, the boundaries of what is regarded as appropriate to put in the public domain are shifting dramatically, but nothing is challenging our notion of privacy more than social networking, with 26 million of us using Facebook to share the minutiae of our lives every month in the UK alone.
PHOTO: AFP
Facebook has proved irresistible to many because we are lured into joining by friends and family. Browsing, comparing and nosing is instinctive, impulsive and reflects our tendencies offline, our “social graph,” as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to call it.
Having executed the social networking business idea better than its rivals — MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and Hi5 have been left for dust — Facebook has seen astonishing growth, from a Harvard dorm project in 2003 to a global phenomenon that had 500 million monthly users by last month.
That’s already one in 13 people on Earth and Zuckerberg recently predicted it was “almost a guarantee” that his site would reach 1 billion users, with growth in relatively untapped markets such as Russia, Japan and South Korea “doubling every six months.”
On Thursday, Facebook unveiled its latest gambit in the battle to remain top of the social networking heap with a move into geolocation services, which harness the GPS functionality of increasingly powerful mobile smartphones. Facebook Places will launch first in the US and later in other countries, allowing users, if they choose, to share their location with friends on the site by checking into public venues.
Sensitive to intense public scrutiny of its privacy controls, Facebook was careful to make the service opt-in, but every geolocation service — including Google’s Latitude, Gowalla and Foursquare — has prompted renewed debate about the protection of personal details online.
“This is a seminal moment where we’re seeing new thinking and new practice starting to emerge around the issue of privacy,” said Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute and a member of Facebook’s safety advisory board. “The battle lines are being drawn between generations. Facebook is headed by someone who hasn’t hit 30, but has very different perceptions and assumptions about what is private and what is not. We need to recognize that with social networking, geolocation and digital technology, the privacy bar is being reset.”
Facebook has come under significant pressure to make its site safer for users. Incidents of serious crimes facilitated by the Internet, such as the murder of British teenager Ashleigh Hall by Peter Chapman earlier this year, are tragic, but rare. More common is the embarrassment from a compromising tagged photo of a drunken night out.
The rapid pace of development by technology companies often throws up new cultural and ethical challenges. Google’s Street View has frequently been challenged by privacy campaigners who question whether the logistical and commercial benefits of making every property in every street visible on the Web are worth the sacrifice of the individual’s right to privacy.
Facebook users first raised their pitchforks in 2006 when the site introduced a news feed for each user, summarizing their friends’ activity. More recently it came under pressure to simplify its privacy controls with some high-profile commentators and groups — organized on Facebook pages, naturally — encouraging others to remove their profiles. It responded in May with simplified privacy settings.
Richard, now Lord, Allan is a former Liberal Democrat lawmaker and Facebook’s European policy director.
“The internet is here to stay as a ubiquitous way for every individual citizen to capture and share information,” Allan said. “The challenge is how you manage that increasing flow of information and that’s where Facebook is at the bleeding edge, allowing people to navigate that world. Expressions of concern and criticisms are really of that direction of travel, rather than any particular product, like Facebook.”
Allan thinks it is an exaggeration to characterize privacy as a natural state of man, citing societies before mass transport where a large community would know every intimate detail of each other’s lives. The modern sense of privacy came much later, with modern transport and cities.
“Notably with new technology, you end up with a utopian viewpoint and a dystopian viewpoint, but a lot of things those dystopians feared did not come true,” he said. “To say you’re ‘living in Facebook rather than the real world’ is a complete misreading of what’s happening. The reason it is so compelling is because it is so connected to the real world. With every wave of technology, we need to get used to it.”
Our personal information can broadly be categorized as trivial data, such as music preferences, behavioral information about our activity and connections, and confidential information including credit card numbers, but even seemingly innocuous information can be used against us, security expert Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro says.
“In isolation, much of this data may be trivial, but from a hacker’s perspective, any information is good information,” Ferguson said. “Use search engines to discover the extent of your online footprint and tailor it. Keep tabs on yourself before anyone else does.”
Balkam describes the Internet’s two biggest privacy problems as reputational damage — inadvertently posting drunken photos that your boss might see, for example — and physical safety, the latter being an issue for women particularly wary of location tools. Burglary is another concern, when users of location services announce they are out of the house — in February, three developers built Pleaserobme.com to raise awareness about the implications of broadcasting location to a public audience.
Currently location games such as Foursquare, where users check in at public venues to earn points and prizes, tend to have a small, enthusiastic and largely trustworthy group of dedicated users comprised of so-called “early adopters.” For them, this period of intensive invention and opportunity is a golden age.
Christian Payne — who describes himself as a “social technologist” — abandoned a career as a photographer in early 2008 when he had a “car crash epiphany.”
Within minutes of tweeting a video of his crashed Land Rover, he had an offer of help from a local crane operator, his AA membership number sent to him and a call from British Telecom asking for the serial number of the telegraph pole he had crashed into. He worries that spirit of helpfulness will dilute as social media becomes more commercialized, and its users more skeptical.
“We’ll never see it like we do now — more nefarious people will come later, but it would be more risky for me not to take the chance of building meaningful connections with acquaintances who then become friends when one of you needs some help,” Payne said.
Payne seems to put a lot of intimate information into the world, but still skillfully manages to keep his personal life, and that of his partner and son, almost completely private. It’s up to the user to decide what they want to keep private, he said, though he’s uncomfortable with the idea that he is unknowingly creating a public persona for himself.
“I’d hope I’m doing this naturally and not thinking about it, but then asking me that is like taking me out of the play I’m acting in as myself — and asking me to direct it,” he said.
The Internet has provided a platform that seems to challenge us to present a single identity to the world, yet we struggle to balance the profiles we share with family, friends and work colleagues.
Stories of employers sacking staff for drunken Facebook photos will be replaced by an acceptance that drunken university pictures are the norm, says Joss Wright, Fresnel research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.
He hopes sites will develop more intuitive ways to share information with the appropriate people — when his grandmother joined Facebook it “severely curtailed” what he could share with his friends.
“I’d like to believe people will learn how to guard their privacy, but we’re more likely to see societal shifts in what is seen as acceptable for privacy,” Wright said. “Privacy has tended to be something quite intrinsic and there hasn’t been a mechanism for privacy violation in general society until the arrival of the Internet.”
Part of Facebook’s success has been to demand people’s real identities. In that way, it represents the maturation of the Internet, where the previous norm had been a wisecrack pseudonym and a world of “trolling,” where faceless, nameless commenters could easily post abusive messages and attack each other.
Balkam recently suggested Facebook recruit a philosopher to help interpret some of the demanding and unprecedented ethical and sociological challenges it faces.
“No company in the world has ever attracted 500 million users and they are having to come to terms, at lightning speed, with what is good and what is abhorrent behavior. Aristotle and Plato struggled with that — and the average age at Facebook is 28,” Balkam said.
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