Point-Counterpoint on Facebook and Privacy
At the New York Times, author and business professor Randall Stross asks, “When Everyone’s a Friend, Is Anything Private?” He believes that “the popularity of Facebook and other social networking sites has promoted the sharing of all things personal, dissolving the line that separates the private from the public.” This means, he says, “[a]s the scope of sharing personal information expands from a few friends to many sundry individuals grouped together under the Facebook label of ‘friends,’ disclosure becomes the norm and privacy becomes a quaint anachronism.”
I don’t believe this is true — that because people reveal parts of their lives online this means they give up privacy about their entire lives. Information studies professor Michael Zimmerman writes a compelling response.
Self-expression and the popularity of a platform for “the sharing of all things personal” doesn’t mean that privacy has become a “quaint anachronism”. Just the opposite. The importance of privacy — and the importance of understanding the complexities of what we think of as privacy — has emerged as issue #1 wrt online social networks. This is obvious to anyone who witnessed the reactions to Facebook’s News Feed or Beacon (which wasn’t just “over-30 graybeards”), or who follows the excellent scholarship & commentary on privacy in social networking sites (like danah boyd or Bill McGeveren or Dan Solove or Fred Stutzman, just to name a few).
And teaching fellow Fred Stutzman takes the analysis further, refuting Stross’s statistical assumptions.
Stross simply has this one wrong. Instead of misguided intuition, let’s look at the numbers. In the Summer/Fall of 2008, Jacob Kramer-Duffield and I ran a survey of undergraduate Facebook users. We employed a list-based simple random sample, with 494 respondents. When asked the question Have you changed the default Facebook privacy settings to give yourself enhanced privacy in Facebook?, 72.47% responded “Yes.” To the question Based on your Facebook privacy settings choices, who do you allow to see your Facebook profile?, 50% answered “Only my Facebook friends.” (1)
Stross would also benefit from looking at Lampe et al., 2008, a longitudinal analysis of Facebook use by a cohort of undergraduate students at Michigan State University. The authors note “In 2006, 64% of users had the default settings for privacy. In 2007, this number dropped to 45% of users who had the default settings, and by users maintained the default privacy settings.” (p. 726) Williams (2008), employing a SRS at Texas Tech, found that “In regard to public access to their Facebook profile, (50.6%) allowed only their friends to access their page, while (71.0%) stated that the primary target of their communication were friends.” (p. 52) Williams writes (in her very interesting thesis) “Perhaps this is an indication that Facebook users, in particular at this institution, have greater concerns for invasions of privacy or a greater need to protect their disclosures from the general Facebook audience.”
There have been a number of privacy questions with Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. See my posts in the archives for more information.
Possibly related posts: