Facebook Privacy Trainwreck

http://www.danah.org/papers/FacebookPrivacyTrainwreck.pdf

In September 2006 Facebook launched a new feature called ‘News Feeds’. This allowed people to see every act their friends did, such as new friends, comments they left on other friends walls, relationship statuses, what groups they joined etc. Before this, this information wasn’t private but News Feeds make the material more visible by displaying it in reverse chronological order. This new feature caused outrage and lead to users forming groups such as ‘Students Against Facebook’.
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg eventually apologised and invited users to listen to him on the ‘Free Flow of Information on the Internet’ group so he could explain why he found News Feeds to be a good idea. He explained that it was a good way of helping people to keep tabs on their friends and that all this information was public anyway.
Before News Feeds if you were a Facebook stalker you would have noticed which friends were becoming friends with other people and who wrote on who’s page and what they were saying but if a friend became a fan of a certain group you might not have realised as you simply didn’t think to look. Now, however you have no choice but to see everything everyone’s doing as it is displayed when you login. By combining all this information and putting it onto everyone’s News Feed Facebook has made everything difficult to miss, meaning that people now had to think about each change they made. Users have to now consider how other people might interpret their actions, most people can’t even remember who they’ve added as a friend let alone knowing how they will interpret information.

Users in certain Facebook groups didn’t want their participation broadcasted on some of their friend’s pages as they wanted to keep some things private e.g. their sexual orientation.
Now individuals are not able to choose what they want to expose they have to choose what they want to hide.
It’s very common to have hundreds of friends on Facebook, however these people are not necessarily close friends and you hardly want to keep up with the lives of all these people. Facebook however assumes that all ‘Friends’ are friends even though most people only have these ‘Friends’ as a handy address book.
News Feeds do not distinguish between your address book friends and the friends you talk to on a daily basis.

News Feeds may even prove to be bad for people as most people want to keep up with the details of interesting people just because they can. Our biological programming makes us believe that people who share personal details are indicating trust while hardly even knowing these people.
Mark Zuckerberg has said though that his goal is to help people to share information more efficiently and News Feeds helps to achieve this without comprising privacy in the process. This is true, but privacy isn’t simply about what people can see it’s a sense of control over information, who can see this information and how people experience their relationship with others and with information. Privacy is a privilege that must be protected in order for it to exist.
‘Information is not private because no one knows it, it is private because the knowing is limited and controlled’.

When visiting someone’s page you could see information in context, when actions and parts of conversations were posted on News Feeds these were taken out of context and made too visible.

With a few adjustments however Facebook managed to convince their users that the advantages of News Feeds outweighed the privacy disadvantages. Users eventually adjusted to News Feeds and began making actions so that they could be broadcast on their friends News Feeds.
Even today News Feeds are still in place and Facebook continues to grow with no sign of slowing down.