Social Networking:
How Social Networking changes our view of privacy
As Social Networking Sites (SNS) in the Internet are faced with an exponential growth, it gets more and more important what kind of personal data users are willing to disclose to get a fully satisfying user-experience in return. These days, many users expect a SNS to allow them to broadcast their thoughts and doings in realtime to all their friends. But that was not always the case; when Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook which has currently over 400 million active users (Facebook, 2010), in 2004 invented the status field that allowed the users to make their thoughts public, many people asked him “What is that good for?” and “Why would I like to post my thoughts to the Internet?”. Since then, posting status messages has become normal for Facebook users and most of them would certainly miss that feature. These status messages are in fact nothing else then highly personal data. It is possible to know a person quite well just by reading this persons Facebook wall. But what does it mean when millions of people feel the demand to disclose their personal data to their friends and often to the whole world? Does this mean that they are less concerned about their privacy than people were previously? My research actually shows exactly the opposite of that; Even if people are sharing quite a lot of their private data, it seems that they care rather more about their privacy then in the early days.
The Term SNS is widely used these days and it may be hard to distinguish where it really applies and where not, so first of all it is important to clarify what exactly a SNS is. Boyd and Ellison (2007) defined it as
web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.
Facebook is a perfect example of a SNS. It allows users to create a profile which they can share with their friends as an closed profile (closed to the public) or to the whole world as an open profile (open to the public). It contains a privacy settings page, which allows users to define exactly which information they want to be public and which private. Furthermore, Facebook allows users to connect their profile to a social graph consisting of their friends and family. And finally users can browse the social graph of their friends to see with whom they are friend. And of course everyone can post status messages which can, depending on the privacy settings, be seen by either just their friends or by everyone who looks at their profile.
An important point, however, is that all users have the guarantied right by law to decide themselves who can access their data. Schaefer and Birkland (2007) distinguished between four guaranteed privacy rights that are guaranteed by law: informational, physical, decision and propriety privacy. Regarding SNS the applicable one is that of informational privacy, which includes the control of personal data. With Facebook this means that all users can control who can see their personal data like name, address, Email address and also their status messages and the comments they made. Facebook does indeed provide the possibility of defining exactly who can access which information about a person. However, these are opt-out settings, which means the default is that every information is shared with everyone. If the users want their data to be private, they have to find the proper setting and change it accordingly.
Even if this privacy rights are guaranteed by law, there are exceptions that allows the FBI for example to see all information submitted through the Internet. The FBI has had the right to observe the digital data of suspects on the Internet for a long time. If they previously had a suspicion that a person did something illegal, they could request this persons data and look over it. But Batra (2008) pointed out that as reaction to the 9/11 attacks, the Patriot Act was released which now gave the FBI the right to store and even automatically analyze information gathered in the Internet. This means they do not even need a suspicion anymore to analyze someone’s data. Everybody‘s data is now automatically checked by a bunch of algorithms to see if it contains content that may be dangerous for the public. If someone, for example, writes an Email to a friend in which he complains about the government and where he writes that he would like to kill the president, the FBIs algorithms would recognize this message as potential dangerous and may alert an agent. This can lead to further observations of this person and in extreme cases even to a black listing so this person is not allowed anymore to enter the US or to fly over US territory.
Thought not just the FBI can see personal information from SNS; because of the opt-out mechanism that defines information as public by default, almost everyone with a computer can gather a lot of information about a person via a SNS. One statistic released by Lampe, Ellison and Steinfield (2008) demonstrated that about one third of the SNS users think that their profile has been watched by possible future employers and even total strangers. Of course, it brings some discomfort to know that people at the company where I just applied for a job can see the party pictures I made last weekend.
As a logical consequence of the assumption that strangers watch their profile and the fact that most SNS users know pretty well that the Internet is everything but anonymous and private, some users have started to obscure their real identity. Quan-Haase and Young (2009) showed that many users try to hide their real identity by providing some fake data or by excluding important information from their profile. The hope of this users is that by doing this, their profile won’t be that easy to find anymore or not relatable to them as person at all.
Although it’s just a minority that try to hide their identity in such a way, most of the SNS users provide their real data and do not even make use of the available privacy settings to hide their information from unknown people. Schrammel, Köffel and Tscheligi (2009) discovered that more then half of the SNS users disclose their real name as well as their picture to the public. A bit less, but still more then one third also share their date of birth and their friend connections with the world. Their profiles can therefore pretty easily be found and their data can be used or misused by anybody.
With the further evolution of SNS and the invention of Photo-services people have been faced with even more possibilities of data disclosure. Ahern, Eckles, Good, King, Naaman and Nair (2007) showed that 28% of photos that show people and were uploaded to a photo-service in the Internet were publicly accessible. Even a larger amount of non-person pictures were public; for example 64% of pictures showing activities were accessibly by everybody. They also found out that just a minority of the people are concerned about the location tagging of the pictures. With this technique, it is possible to see on a map where the users were at the moment when they took the picture. This information can, of course, easily be misused for example by a stalker to physically meet the person that took the picture.
The fact that SNS users disclose their data in such a liberal way does not mean, that they do not care about their privacy. In fact, most are very concerned about their privacy. Kasper (2005) found that 79% of adults think it is “extremity important” to be in control of their personal data. This shows the difference between the concerns of the users and what they actually do to protect their personal data. On one side, they are very concerned about their privacy but on the other side are they sharing their information quite freely.
This willingness to provide personal information despite the concern about privacy might have its roots in the unlimited confidence that especially the younger users have in the Internet. While evaluating the search behavior of people on the Internet, Conti and Sobiesk (2007) came across the interesting fact that younger people are much more likely to search for sensitive keywords, that they do not want their employer to know about, than older users. This indicates that older Internet users do not fully trust in the shallow web-anonymity while the younger ones are much more trustworthy. It also exhibits the different mentality of the users that grew up with the Internet and others that also know the time before it.
As younger users are willing to trust the Internet more and more, some of the elder people might argue that SNS and the Internet in general mislead younger generations to disclose too much private data about themselves. While the elder ones in fact just may not know how to handle these new technologis. It may be true, that younger users are willing to share more information on the internet than elders, but as showed before they are well aware that this information can be watched by other people and will therefore mostly not share any sensitive information.
This fear, that new technologies lead to a reduction in privacy, could already be seen several times in latest history. People were also very concerned about their privacy after the invention of photography, the telephone and especially in the late 1960s after the computer was invented (Kasper, 2005). As we know now, however, our privacy rights do still exist even after these inventions.
Even if the disclosing of private data in SNS can be a serious problem, we can not deny the benefits we get in response. Ferrell, Nowak and Phelps (2000) found that people actually expect personalized Marketing and that they would be upset if they lost it. This expectation can just be fulfilled if the users continue to provide some amount of private data.
References
Facebook Statistics (2010). Retrieved April 13, 2010 from http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
Boyd, D.M., & Ellison, N.B. (2007, October). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13, Article 11. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
Birkland, T.A., & Schaefer, T.M. (2007). Encyclopedia of media and politics. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press. Batra, N. D. (2008). Digital freedom: how much can you handle? Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield.
Ellison, N. B., Lampe, C., & Steinfield, C. (2008). Changes in use and perception of Facebook. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 721-730). San Diego, CA: ACM. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://portal.acm.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/citation.cfm?doid=1460563.1460675
Quan-Haase, A., Young, & A.L. (2009). Information revelation and Internet privacy concerns on social network sites: a case study of facebook. Communities and Technologies (pp. 265-274). University Park, PA: ACM. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://portal.acm.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/citation.cfm?id=1556460.1556499
Köffel, C., Schrammel, J., & Tscheligi, M. (2009). Personality traits, usage patterns and information disclosure in online communities. British Computer Society Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 169-174). Cambridge, UK: British Computer Society. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://portal.acm.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/citation.cfm?id=1671031
Ahern, S., Eckles, D., Good, N.S., King, S., Naaman, M., & Nair, R. (2007). Over-exposed?: privacy patterns and considerations in online and mobile photo sharing. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 357-366). San Jose, CA: ACM. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://portal.acm.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/citation.cfm?id=1240624.1240683
Kasper, D.V.S. (2005) The Evolution (Or Devolution) of Privacy. Sociological Forum, 20, 69-92. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://www.jstor.org/pss/4540882
Conti, G., & Sobiesk, E. (2007). An honest man has nothing to fear: user perceptions on web-based information disclosure. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (pp. 112-121). Pittsburgh, PA: ACM. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://portal.acm.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/citation.cfm?id=1280680.1280695
Phelps, J., Nowak, G., Ferrell, E. (2000). Privacy Concerns and Consumer Willingness to Provide Personal Information. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 19, 27-41. Retrieved April 13, 2010, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/30000485
Comments (0)