The Facebook Reckoning
September 13, 2010
There's a lengthy, excellent profile of Mark Zuckerberg, and by proxy Facebook, in this week's issue of the New Yorker, written by Jose Antonio Vargas. In it, I'm quoted saying about Mark, "If you are twenty-six years old, you’ve been a golden child, you’ve been wealthy all your life, you’ve been privileged all your life, you’ve been successful your whole life, of course you don’t think anybody would ever have anything to hide". That's an accurate quote, but there's even more nuance to my feelings about Facebook than merely remarking on the privilege of its CEO.
First, the requisite disclaimers: I like and use Facebook; I have many friends, including some good friends, who work at the company at all levels of its hierarchy. I've met Mark Zuckerberg a few times, and while we aren't friends, our few interactions have been nothing but cordial. My business partner Michael Wolf famously tried to acquire Facebook during his time at MTV Networks and thinks highly of Mark. The tech projects that I influence, from Gourmet Live to ThinkUp deeply integrate Facebook into their core functions. So I'm not a knee-jerk anti-Facebook reactionary.
The truth is, I care deeply about the culture of the web, and am concerned that many of the decisions Facebook makes are detrimental to its culture, particularly when Facebook inadvertently imposes an extreme set of values on its users without adequately communicating the consequences of those choices.
I'm not the first to raise these issues, particularly in the context of Facebook's stance on privacy. The cover of Time magazine a few months back was about Facebook's privacy issues. Mark responded with a lengthy and somewhat vague response to the concerns, indicating that he realizes the seriousness of the challenge these issues pose for the company. At the time, a scrappy upstart efforts called Diaspora* captured the imagination of those who are frustrated by Facebook's repeated inability to address these issues and raised nearly $200,000 from thousands of donors who hoped to sponsor a significant challenge to Facebook's domination of large-scale social networking. And of course The Social Network, the massive movie based on Facebook's early founding, is only two weeks from release.
But actually, I don't care that much about privacy.
I started blogging when I was younger than Mark is today, and have shared a lot more information publicly about every aspect of my life than he ever has. It's been eight years since I wrote about privacy through identity control, and the key point there seems as relevant today as it did then:
We're all celebrities now, in a sense. Everything that we say or do is on the record. And everything that's on the record is recorded for posterity, and indexed far better than any file photo or PR bio ever was. It used to be that only those who chose career paths that resulted in notoriety or celebrity would face having to censor themselves or be forced to consciously control the image that they project.
What I do care about is this company advocating for a pretty radical social change to be inflicted on half a billion people without those people's engagement, and often, effectively, without their consent. As we saw with the rollout of Facebook's user names feature, the tech industry is very poorly equipped to talk about complex issues of identity and strongly prefers to talk about companies and features instead of communities and choice.
Because, let's be clear, Facebook is philosophically run by people who are extremists about information sharing. Though I choose to talk about my politics, or my identity, or my medical history or my personal relationships, I can do so primarily because I have the privilege to do so thanks to my social standing, wealth, and the arbitrary fact of being born in the United States. I also have an identity that isn't considered offensive or off-putting enough to face serious repercussions.
But what if I weren't my own boss? What if my family couldn't accept parts of my identity? What if I weren't technologically savvy enough to know how to engage with all of the choices about public sharing that Facebook forces me to understand? What if it were important to my own personal identity that public representations of me be colored purple instead of blue, as on Facebook? It's easy to say all of our choices and all the aspects of our identity can be shared if we don't face any serious social or personal consequences for doing so. But most of us are not that fortunate.
I'd say today's story obliquely covers that as well.
Colors don’t matter much to Zuckerberg; a few years ago, he took an online test and realized that he was red-green color-blind. Blue is Facebook’s dominant color, because, as he said, “blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.”
As it turns out, the way we can all express ourselves on Facebook today is literally constrained by the limits of what Mark Zuckerberg can see. I've been in environments that were constrained in similar ways; The first time I entered the Harvard Club here in New York City to visit with a friend, I felt very acutely the implicit judgments of an environment where the fact that I don't have a college education was considered a relevant way to judge my identity. And though I use Facebook, I don't ever forget that it was conceived as a private club for members of the Ivy League as well.
Perhaps by engaging more with its users in an honest way about its radical stance on public sharing, and by clearly articulating the social costs that can arise from that stance, Facebook can become as truly inclusive as it strives to be.
9:42 AM
|
14 Comments
Leave a comment
- Earlier: Nine is New New York
- Next: Cloudtop Applications
Wow, great article, Anil. Like you I enjoy Facebook and use it a lot. I've made new friends there and gotten back in touch with people I knew in high school and college. And yet I find it an oppressive environment. When you set it beside the extremist viewpoint on transparency, bans on pseudonymous accounts and breastfeeding pictures, repeated privacy invasions, and arbitrary account suspensions, the overwhelming blueness of the user experience doesn't seem like that big a deal.
Still Zuckerberg's refusal to provide any options for people to even select a different color or refuse to select a gender (another hot button) just because these aren't issues he cares about is yet another indication that unless Facebook changes in a hurry, they may well be facing a reckoning.
jon
Awesome post Anil. I too worry about the cultural precedents that are set by Facebook. Similar to you, I personally am not afraid. But I too am my own boss. I benefit from sharing parts of my life online. That is not the same for everyone and yet Facebook has become a "utility" (their own choice of words). I worry about any utility that becomes privatized without proper restraints.
You ask some interesting What if's, Anil, but could you take your thoughts, and concerns a little further?
You seem to suggest that "most of us" "face [some] serious social or personal consequences" for sharing "our choices and ... aspects of our identity." Could you be a little more explicit?... What sorts of consequences do you have in mind?... Even if it's not necessarily "most of us," perhaps it's "a lot of us," or enough of us in any case are at risk of these consequences for all of us to be concerned.
What should we do with the concerns you raise? What would you like Facebook to do with these concerns?... Moderate its "information sharing extremism?..." How? And why exactly?... What's in it for them?... Is there a business reason for them to do this? Or is it more a question of their civic responsibility?...
I'd be curious to hear you talk a little more about what's really at stake here.
Great post Anil. Facebook does have very elitist, extremist roots. I read the book as prompted by listeners of TWiST. I also listen to TWiG. I have been following ThinkUp on GitHub due to TWiG. Needless to say, I value your input and its nice to see someone of your stature take this stance as I am in agreement. For me, Facebook has these following effects the more I use it:
1.) Narcisism - using it makes us more narcicistic than we'd otherwise be.
2.) Voyuerism - Feeds off the narcicism.
3.) Takes our attention away from things that are much more important in life, like looking where we are going, etc.
4.) There is virtually no back end payoff to using Facebook other than the euphoric feeling of catching up with old friends. We recoup much less (zero) benefit from revealing our likes to Facebook than we would by doing the same on our own blogs.
Personally, I have stopped using Facebook. Yes, I was addicted to it. And for no good reason. I am better off without it. And yes, I am social on the web without it. The internet is much bigger than Facebook will ever be. And that will never change.
While Anil may have other consequences in mind, I can certainly provide situations where privacy is of utmost importance, and that would be in abusive and post-abusive situations.
When Zuckerberg and the rest of FB was talking about sharing information with "everyone", they made it sound benign: the cute girl you met last night at a party, your old college roommate, someone out there with your same interests who could become your soulmate. But when I think of sharing with "everyone" I have one face in mind: the step-parent who abused me when I was a child.
I've gone through therapy, I have a different last name, I've moved 1000 miles, but when I joined Facebook I was initially honest about when I graduated high school and what college I attended. That was enough for my abuser to find me. So one afternoon while checking my FB messages, I find a message from that person: "I'm so sorry/it was the alcohol/but really, it wasn't that bad, was it?" After having a panic attack, I block everyone with that name and any family member who may still be in contact with that person, thinking that should resolve the problem, that I wouldn't find an emotional landmine when I next log into FB. A few weeks later, a cousin (who unfortunately went through a similar experience), found a message from her abuser, not from the abuser's account, but from the account of one of the abuser's co-workers. My cousin left FB completely after that, but I still wanted to keep in contact with people across the country, and FB is currently the best way to do that. So I deleted my account, started a new account under a pseudonym, provided fake information, and selectively gave my account name to the friends I wanted to have on FB.
The odd thing I've noticed about abusers (and I have a few friends/relatives who are in the same boat) is that they don't stay in the background. The people who were abused who are functioning, who didn't descend into a bottle or a syringe, have been very good at cutting off contact with their abuser. But the abuser, through a combination of guilt and rationalization, keeps trying to get back into contact. Guilt due to the realization that beating your child and/or copping a feel was probably a bad thing, and rationalization of that behavior, because if the abused cuts off contact completely then that means it was bad, but if contact can be maintained, even through a medium like a social network, then the behavior couldn't have been that bad, couldn't have been "abusive". At least that's been my experience.
So yeah, whenever I see a statement from FB about how privacy is going away, how everything is going to be open, I think to myself, "Good for them. None of them have ever been in an abusive relationship. I hope for their sake they never are."
Anil,
Facebook�s arrogance is worrisome for another reason: it provides cover for the flailings and ill-formed guesses of everyone else who thinks out loud about privacy design. Two of your examples make my point.
Vanity URLs have been a core web feature since day one, right? Your registering dashes.com is no more socially radical than your liberty to introduce yourself by name rather than birthdate. And I can�t think of a more circumspect approach: facebook made usernames opt-in, demonstrating up front how the change would affect representations inside and outside the site. Critics� failure to be troubled by the earlier default, a person marked by a number, is beyond baffling.
Earlier you spoke of webspace ownership as �identity control� without unpacking those two words and how tenuously they relate to one another. Running this site means you get to tune your self-projections, yes. Although I doubt Movable Type puts a toggle above each textbox letting you select your audience all the way down to the level of single-person privileges. No points for guessing which publishing platform does offer that toggle.
With colour, though, you get to match what displays here to your persona. Key word: here. What say do you have over your content as it flows to other channels, such as feed readers, the blogosphere, search engines, disk caches, server farms, or the offline world? Very little say. Context will degrade through those channels, each and every last one, yet still you�ll use them to make connections with other people.
Talk of choice too often ignores choices exercised at the other end of an expression. When CSS, RSS, and browser extensibility rolled out, did you take them to be radical cultural constructs or cool experiments? Do you wring your hands whenever a reader changes purple to blue, or 10-point to 14-point, without the writer�s consent? Do the needs of the colourblind or vision-impaired come last to everyone else�s fantasies of perfect self-projection?
In truth, nobody gets unilateral control of networked information. Through every medium, online or off, its flows are negotiated. Social software designers can work to secure choice for people � and more choice than either facebook or Movable Type enable today, I hope � but never uncomplicated choice.
Zuckerberg is a Robber Baron and the natural resource he's plundering is our privacy. The most interesting line in your post is about the tech industry being I'll equipped to discuss the complex issues of identity.
I think this issue is quite similar to what Danny Sullivan always says about Google -- if they maintain that they so open + transparent, then let's see their algorithms!
The truth is that they're *NOT* open -- but the funny thing is that it doesn't really matter all that much... because their impressions aren't really better than anyone else's. TBH, a realtor should be much more concerned about being on realtor.com than being anywhere else (the same goes, of course, for other keywords, other TLDs, other so-called "natural" languages, etc.).
All of these brand-name sites are so ephemeral.
:) nmw
As a human investment made by millions of internet users into new forms of identity expression and new forms of online community, Facebook teases out an interaction where the participants are there but not there, in touch but never touching, as deeply connected as we are profoundly alienated.
At the stage where communicative practices are shifting from anonymity towards identity, how to afford new ways of experiencing the self and new ways of relating to groups in society? Privacy is the price to pay.
Good article. I wonder how long facebook will live.. i use it, i like it, but i am aware that i only like it because all my friends are on it.. if all my friend started moving to something new, like they did from MySpace to Facebook - that would be where i would spend my time.. We make facebook work.. if we (as users) go somewhere else, it is just a bunch of code.. i think it is sad when people start using it and have no idea how it works, i have seen people very quickly get into quite a mess when they start - not realizing who can see what.. i think that we need to implement curriculum in Junior High on managing your virtual identity.. everything from sending nude pix of yourself to another person's phone and the possible footprint that leaves to how checking in places, blogging, facebooking etc can create an over all impression of yourself that can often not be retracted. Some people don't realize that even after you remove something from the internet, how often it has already been saved several other places automatically and some people may have saved it manually, or tumblr-ed it or created a copy on their own computer.. things like that..
I was actually told by a manager at my old company not to talk about the company on facebook. The comment I made was not slanderous or negative, but it was still criticized. He was not a "friend" on my account - but apparently he was shown my profile by a "friend" who wasn't a "friend". It did make me more aware of the fact that my words were being clocked by someone I had chosen to "trust" in the virtual world who had chosen to use them against me.
I was also told by a potential employer that I had too high a virtual profile and if I was hired I would have to delete my twitter, facebook, google profile, blogs, etc... I declined the third interview at that point..
Managing your virtual identity is a full time job.. setting up google alerts can help with everything from your full name to your phone number, your address, your email addresses etc.. you would be surprised what pops up where and when...
anyway, i think by the time the kids in elementary now are my age, they will be buying "new" identities from a service who sells them.. so they can separate from all the bad press they have caused themselves in their mis-spent youth!
The thing most Facebook privacy critics are overlooking is that violating privacy is the precise reason Facebook is so successful. It is the first site to successfully tie people to their real name as opposed to a some vague and arbitrary username. Tech folks have always known about privacy issues and that's why the convention of usernames was established.
Facebook only a phenomenon because I can type in someone's real name and look at real information about them. At a glance I can tell if they are the person I am looking for. Without violating pre-established privacy conventions (and they are just that) Facebook would not exist.
People want an un-anonymous internet. They want to be able to share without it being difficult, in the same way they want roads. And like roads, an internet free of anonymity can be dangerous. People need to cultivate skills in preserving the level of privacy they want, but that burden falls to the individual.
No one is forced to use Facebook. And no one is forced to share more than they want to share. There are potential repercussions to any sort of social interaction and Facebook is just that: another type of social interaction. People should learn how to deal with it - or avoid it.
Anil,
I fear that when you write "But actually, I don't care that much about privacy" you must have a different interpretation of privacy than I do. As a European living in the USA I'm often amazed at what is considered private over here. Do you not care that your social security number or health records might be exposed and used by someone? Or do you not care that everyone can track you online using search tools to see what you've been up to? Those are two very separate issues surely.
My idea of privacy is to be left alone when I choose to, and to share certain details when I choose to. I am capable of disabling my location aware mobile device, I'm up to date on my Facebook privacy tools. I don't use Foursquare or Gowalla and I don't give out my mobile number easily.
I think Americans consider privacy differently than I do. They often live in walled and gated neighborhoods in the suburbs to escape urban life, they protect their social security numbers like gold, they fear strangers. And yet they have loud and open personal conversations in public on their mobile phones and post every single detail and photo of their personal exploits on Facebook!
We live in strange times...
As a parent, the privacy issue is of particular concern to me because I have to limit what I say in order not to infringe upon my children's privacy. It's one thing to write something that is a disclosure to the world about myself, but quite another to share info that affects my kids. And I'm not just talking about posting cute "baby in the bathtub" pictures.
There are many things I'm willing to make public. There are others I'm not. When facebook keeps changing the privacy options on me, I see it as a broken promise. If FB says up front that everyone can see everything I write, I'll act accordingly. But when I sign up expecting certain things to be private and then one day they no longer are, without me having had any opportunity to delete them beforehand, I learn not to share anything but the most superficial comments and links - and that diminishes what FB could be.
Wow. Thank you so much for this post.
I love how Facebook is easing the public into a more open web; even if it is by force. But at the same time I am conflicted by their methods, since I see so many people's privacy being unknowingly exposed.
For example, our kids. What about our children sounds so corny but reading tragic news about suicides from bullying, remembering how cruel kids can be through my own experiences and picturing how I would feel if that cruelty were exposed on Facebook for all to see makes me ill.
I want to say it is the user's responsibility but when I take a step away from the tech bubble think it is up to those in tech to advocate for the critical masses; especially kids.
The key here, is for fair voices like yours to raise awareness and hope those building the leading products listen. Especially, since I don't think their myopia is elitism but more of a societal problem our country is facing: socio-economic division. (James Fallows has a great ongoing series about this on The Atlantic here: http://goo.gl/XFfW)
Anyway, thanks again for this post and for all that you do.