Public by Default, Private when Necessary
With Facebook systematically dismantling its revered privacy infrastructure, I think it's important to drill down on the issue of privacy as it relates to teens. There's an assumption that teens don't care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy settings are a binary. What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways. When teens argue that they produce content that is "public by default, private when necessary," they aren't arguing that privacy is disappearing. Instead, they are highlighting that both privacy AND publicity have value. Privacy is important in certain situations - to not offend, to share something intimate, or to exclude certain people. Yet, publicity can also be super useful. It's about being present in social situations, about chance encounters, about obtaining social status.
Once upon a time on Facebook, participants had to be a vetted member of a community to even have an account. Privacy was a deeply held value and many turned to Facebook because of the ways in which it protected them from making public mistakes. This was especially core to youth participation. Parents respected Facebook's attitudes towards privacy and, in a shocking moment of agreement, teens did too.
Slowly, things have changed. Most recently, Facebook made it possible for users to make Facebook content public (presumably to compete with Twitter). When participants signed in, they were asked whether or not they wanted they wanted to change their privacy settings. Many were confused and just clicked through, not realizing that this made their content more public than it was before. This upset some legal types and Facebook was forced to retreat, making the status quo the default instead of tricking folks into being public.
Recently, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg made comments that amount to "the age of privacy is over" as justification for why the company has decided to get with the times and make things more public. This prompted me to rant about Facebook's decision.
Social media has enabled new forms of publicity, structures that allow people to connect as widely as they can build an audience. Teens are embracing this to do all sorts of powerful things. But they aren't doing so to eschew privacy. They are still keeping intimate things close to their hearts or trying to share content with narrow groups of people. It's just that, in many situations, there is more to be gained by accepting the public default than by going out of one's way to keep things private. And here's where we see the shift. It used to take effort to be public. Today, it often takes effort to be private.
While Facebook has justified its decisions by citing shifts in societal expectations, they are doing a disservice to those who value Facebook precisely because of its culture of keeping things more close. It's not so much that posting things on Facebook was ever private; no teen sees the Wall as a private space. It's that the default was not persistent, searchable, and scaled to a mass degree. Just because teens choose to share some content widely does not mean that they wish all content could be universally accessible. What they want is a sense of control. And what Facebook is doing is destabilizing the system in a way that complicates control, especially for teens who are most vulnerable of having content go down on their permanent record.
Image credit: Compound Eye http://www.flickr.com/photos/paopix/244067624/
Comments
Another aspect that gives pause for reflection on sites like Facebook is that the public / private distinction is a bit illusary. Sure, you can decide that you will share certain things with only your X # of "friends". But there is nothing to stop any of those "friends" from sharing those things with anyone they please.
To me, it still comes down to not putting anything on sites like Facebook that you would not be comfortable sharing with the world.
Is there more context to his, "the age of privacy is over," quote? From
where I stand, it just sounds dumb. Facebook has certainly made it easier for anyone to be very, very public, but it hasn't replaced more private/opaque media like AIM, SMS, Second Life, etc. The question isn't whether people want those options; the question is whether FB wants a piece of that market.
Great article as always danah. All of the major social networking services, including Facebook, provide alternate default permission sets to under 18/17 year olds (varies by service), partly in response to the work done by the UK Home Office's Good Practice In Social Networking Service Provision working group. The purpose of the alternative default sets being primarily to insure that young people don't dive into public conversations and self representation without having an awareness of what that might mean and making a conscious decision. It isn't enough to support young people - I'd argue that we need properly resourced and implemented national digital literacy programmes - but it's better that nothing. The accessibility of public content to search engines is a significant shift, but as far as I know Facebook haven't changed their policy on under 17's defaults. Be good to have some assurance though - maybe Chris Kelly would like to/has commented?
I am very concerned about sexual predators and Web 2.0 tools. When people become too isolated, they tend to overvalue technological connections as being safe and secure. Many teen prostitutes now take up residence in the city in which I live. It is a sad thing to see. So, when Zuckerberg states that privacy is no longer, I think that he is purely wishing to access data and information at the expense of personal security. Facebook is trying its best to figure out monetization models to go public, and I doubt they care much about the users of Facebook themselves. I have followed the process they have used for "user input" and they have not taken any of it seriously. Before privacy speech was the Terms of Service debacle. What is going to be next?
Really interesting post. Thx. Bravo for giving teens the credit that they care about the distinction, perhaps not at the level of policy, but instead, at the layer of what is the impact on "me and my communities".
I think there is also another element - behavioral implications. No number of strong or weak privacy tools will help if we haven't taught our teens about the power of content and helped them think about what content is appropriate to post, how there is a very fine line (if any) between public and private, etc. In many ways, this is an analog lesson first (one that becomes all the more important when there are "forever" digital trails left behind) - what you say, how you show up, how you behave accrues to how people perceive you. Good life lessons and critical thinking are even more central today to our teen's success and keeping them safe as they move into adulthood.
Hi danah, this is a great essay. Both critical and balanced (unlike some of the overwrought rhetoric I've seen).
That said, this sentence in your last paragraph could use some work "It's that the default was not persistent, searchable, and scaled to a mass degree". It's a bit awkward, and I think you might need to unpack it a bit (particularly the persistent part, I've only heard developers use that word in this sense).
Perhaps something like this "But the default wasn't to make content part of a massively scaled, publicly searchable, permanent archive."
Other than that nitpick, this is a great essay. Thanks for summarizing the issue so clearly!