Tuesday, February 19, 2008
NYT Editorial on Facebook
Titled One Friend Facebook Hasn't Made Yet: Privacy Rights, this editorial from 2/18 makes a number of absolutely legitimate points, but in two areas, The Times got it wrong.
First to the right. Recently it became apparent that deleting a Facebook account didn't delete all traces of it. In two areas, information remained. One, over which Facebook has no control, is the result of Google (and other searches) that find the public version of a Facebook user's profile. It shouldn't be news to anyone by now that Google caches images of the Web pages that it searches. Long after the Web page has disappeared, you can still often view an image of what it looked like. (The safest way of minimizing this situation appears to be not to remove Web pages you don't want to be visible but rather to revise them--even to a blank page, so that Google will cache a new image.) Facebook users can control if their public profile can be shown in search engines, but it's an opt-out feature. The Times suggests more opt-in features, and that's not unreasonable.
Although not mentioned in The Times editorial, reports seem to indicate some loose ends of user information floating around Facebook after account deletion. My guess is that it may be records in the join table that matches two users as friends. Someone may have assumed that if an account is closed, nothing will be shown for a now-deleted account of a friend, but we know now (see Iran-Contra, the Nixon Tape Gap, the millions of possibly missing White House email messages) that these little traces can often be put back together again.
On these points, The Times is right.
On the bigger point, The Times quotes Erving Goffman on the concept of "identity management," and suggests that online sites such as MySpace and Facebook should "give users as much control over their identities online as they have offline." Good idea. Excellent idea. But then, The Times continues: "Users should be asked if they want information to be viewable by others, and by whom: Their friends? Everyone in the world? Privacy settings, which allow for this kind of screening, should be prominent, clear and easily managed."
Sorry Times, that's not how it works in the offline world. We think we have a lot more control than we do. The hunky TV star who made the cover of a supermarket tabloid on a security camera in a porn store and, on the inside, a copy of his itemized receipt for what would appear to be the ingredients of a gay adventure made an assumption of privacy that didn't exist. Sure, that's a TV star, but local media (not to mention) blogs exist for The Rest of Us. Unless you hide in a cave, you will present yourself to the public in ways that you think you can control.
Yes, providing opt-in privacy settings is a great idea. Many Web sites are loathe to do so, because it drastically cuts down on the amount of information that they can publish. But when a social networking site lets users control their visibility, the same social graph that enables so many interactions can come into play. If my friend X says she has come up with some privacy settings that make sense to her, I may adopt them for myself. The Social Web is largely about control--and that control does live with users to a greater extent than ever before.
But control of one's public image--online or off--is a tough thing to pull off. To a greater or lesser extent, we are all Paris Hilton.
First to the right. Recently it became apparent that deleting a Facebook account didn't delete all traces of it. In two areas, information remained. One, over which Facebook has no control, is the result of Google (and other searches) that find the public version of a Facebook user's profile. It shouldn't be news to anyone by now that Google caches images of the Web pages that it searches. Long after the Web page has disappeared, you can still often view an image of what it looked like. (The safest way of minimizing this situation appears to be not to remove Web pages you don't want to be visible but rather to revise them--even to a blank page, so that Google will cache a new image.) Facebook users can control if their public profile can be shown in search engines, but it's an opt-out feature. The Times suggests more opt-in features, and that's not unreasonable.
Although not mentioned in The Times editorial, reports seem to indicate some loose ends of user information floating around Facebook after account deletion. My guess is that it may be records in the join table that matches two users as friends. Someone may have assumed that if an account is closed, nothing will be shown for a now-deleted account of a friend, but we know now (see Iran-Contra, the Nixon Tape Gap, the millions of possibly missing White House email messages) that these little traces can often be put back together again.
On these points, The Times is right.
On the bigger point, The Times quotes Erving Goffman on the concept of "identity management," and suggests that online sites such as MySpace and Facebook should "give users as much control over their identities online as they have offline." Good idea. Excellent idea. But then, The Times continues: "Users should be asked if they want information to be viewable by others, and by whom: Their friends? Everyone in the world? Privacy settings, which allow for this kind of screening, should be prominent, clear and easily managed."
Sorry Times, that's not how it works in the offline world. We think we have a lot more control than we do. The hunky TV star who made the cover of a supermarket tabloid on a security camera in a porn store and, on the inside, a copy of his itemized receipt for what would appear to be the ingredients of a gay adventure made an assumption of privacy that didn't exist. Sure, that's a TV star, but local media (not to mention) blogs exist for The Rest of Us. Unless you hide in a cave, you will present yourself to the public in ways that you think you can control.
Yes, providing opt-in privacy settings is a great idea. Many Web sites are loathe to do so, because it drastically cuts down on the amount of information that they can publish. But when a social networking site lets users control their visibility, the same social graph that enables so many interactions can come into play. If my friend X says she has come up with some privacy settings that make sense to her, I may adopt them for myself. The Social Web is largely about control--and that control does live with users to a greater extent than ever before.
But control of one's public image--online or off--is a tough thing to pull off. To a greater or lesser extent, we are all Paris Hilton.
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