Big Brother has added you as a friend on Facebook!
Is personal privacy something the general person values today? If the social networking website ‘Facebook’ is any indication, privacy might not be all that important to many people.
According to Facebook’s own website statistics, the site has more than 57 million active users, with an average of 250,000 new registrations per day since January of 2007. With so many people using the site, I believe it is worthwhile to consider what impact Facebook might have on the perception of privacy.
As most college students already know, Facebook is a networking program that allows users to create and share personal profiles over the internet. These profiles can include information such as demographics, educational background, interests, sexual orientation, political views, religious beliefs and photographs. This information is voluntarily disclosed by the site’s users and can be viewed anonymously by other Facebook users.
In addition to the basic profile features, Facebook also offers communication applications such as “The Wall” that make it possible to send and receive messages from others that are publicly displayed on the user’s profile page. In this way, not only does Facebook publicize a person’s individual characteristics, it also publicizes that person’s interpersonal relationships for other users to view anonymously.
On the face of it, the use of these features may seem innocuous because, for the most part, only people who know each other will be viewing each others’ profiles. In fact, Facebook offers privacy controls that allow users to limit both their viewable content and who can see their complete profiles. However, since the primary purpose of the site is to share personal information, most users are likely to keep their privacy settings low—especially since the low settings are the default (requiring user’s to take the initiative to protect their privacy). My opinion is that, regardless of who actually ends up viewing a person’s profile, there are psychological consequences to the voluntary disclosure of personal information within a medium whose primary purpose is to share that information publicly.
The central psychological consequence of concern to me is that individuals might become accustomed to living their private lives publicly. Instead of valuing their individual thoughts, beliefs and feelings as part of their private personal property, these psychological commodities, when donated to the public sphere so readily, lose their element of personal significance to the individual. Even though the volunteering of personal information on Facebook is for entertainment reasons, the feeling of knowingly being monitored by anonymous viewers can still erode one’s appreciation for privacy in other areas.
For example, in recent years the concern over terrorism has given rise to many aggressive acts by intelligence and security agencies to probe increasingly deeper into the personal spheres of citizens’ lives. Without a strong appreciation for personal privacy, the general public is less likely to challenge such invasive attempts by authorities and will likely relinquish the details of their personal lives without concern.
Additionally, surveillance technologies such as phone tapping and video recording have made the issue of privacy even more pressing because the act of monitoring has become more ubiquitous and anonymous. Even when the average citizen is aware that they are likely being monitored, they do not necessarily know where, how or by whom. This sort of situation, at its most extreme, can be compared to the Big Brother apparatus described in the novel 1984 where personal privacy is completely annihilated.
As a person who happens to value personal privacy, I believe Facebook users ought to be more careful about how much information they communicate through their profile pages. As surveillance technology evolves (along with the motivation to use it) individual privacy will be continually challenged. The first step in preserving privacy is to resist voluntarily disclosing it in public forums. And nowhere is this more pronounced than in the internet forum Facebook.
December 7th, 2007 at 00:44
I assume you’ve heard about the sales tracking application facebook has now retracted. It uploaded information about users’ internet purchases onto facebook, offering an ‘opt-out’ as opposed to ‘opt-in’ policy, similar in nature to the default ‘low’ privacy settings mentioned in your article. Similar, in that both applications assume less privacy as a desired norm.
I agree that the site is a worrying indication of the extent of our collective fascination with self-exhibition, self-promotion, and self-definition.
December 7th, 2007 at 13:53
I actually didn’t hear about that particular application, but it is consistent with a clause in their privacy policy:
“We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services, Facebook Platform developers and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile. Where such information is used, we generally allow you to specify in your privacy settings that you do not want this to be done or to take other actions that limit the connection of this information to your profile (e.g., removing photo tag links).”
I’m pleased to hear that you agree with my argument. I like your wording of “opt-in” and “opt-out”–I think that captures the point more concisely than my own wording. On paper, the presence of privacy controls seems like a sufficient precaution for privacy concerns, but when users have to opt-out of voluntary disclosure instead of opt-in, the reality is that people are reluctant to take the initiative over matters that don’t immediately and obviously affect them.