Another day, another Facebook privacy maelstrom.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to explain his vision for the future of privacy last Friday at the Crunchies awards in San Francisco. He basically said that norms had evolved in favor of more sharing and that the company had retooled its defaults with these changes in mind.
To people in that room — most of whom have comfortably tweeted away for years — it really wasn’t that alarming. But taken out of context, these words created a firestorm. The barrage of headlines went out: ‘Zuckerberg Says the Age of Privacy is Over’, and the very charged debates about last month’s privacy overhaul erupted.
Here’s what he said. (I also wrote my own take on the future of privacy here.) Judge for yourself:
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“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, Why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?
“And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.
“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change — doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now, and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”
I don’t think Zuckerberg is being disingenuous. He saw the community of early adopters moving toward public sharing habits and was probably concerned about being sidelined in the way that his predecessors have been. He wanted to make changes without alienating older users, so Facebook launched very intricate privacy settings allowing users to adjust how widely or narrowly they shared content.
If you’re into choice architecture, Facebook did what amounted to a paternalistic nudge in the direction of public sharing by shifting privacy defaults. There are still granular controls, and you still have the option of keeping almost your entire profile private outside of basic information like your name, profile picture and fan pages. The company also backtracked on making friend lists fully visible after a backlash.
At the end of the day, Facebook is a for-profit enterprise. Users enter into an agreement with Facebook where they share information for a free and valuable service that connects them with friends. They do this knowing that Facebook can and will earn a profit using that data. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
Likewise, Facebook knows that if it damages the perception that it cares about privacy, users won’t trust it. While more public data could boost pageviews and enrich search and discovery, there are also costs. With lower trust, users might share less about themselves, undermining the content of the site. That would also erode Facebook’s unique value, making it less distinct from other online spaces.
Plus it might open the door for others to capitalize on demand for a private space. It sounds impossible given Facebook’s aggressive platform and feature roll-outs, but people have shown that they will switch online communities if there are better alternatives or spaces with more perceived integrity. There have been plenty of times I have run into talented developers here who have lamented the loss of the “old Facebook” e.g. the one you could post your irresponsible photos on. Mishandling the privacy issue also increases the chance of unfavorable laws or legal precedents.
The real challenge Facebook faces, though, is not that it has to handle user rights perfectly — as long as the company exists, there will be a healthy tug-of-war with its community. Instead, it’s that people aren’t just a single identity that can be expressed on one platform.
COO Sheryl Sandberg likes to say that Facebook is the space where you can be your “authentic self.” But a reason multiple social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn have been able to co-exist and prosper is because we have many authentic selves. There is a self I present to my boss, a self I present to my family, a self I present to the public and one for my closest friends. They’re all different, authentic and they often contradict each other.
In the past, society separated these identities with physical walls and spaces. There was the home, the office, the church and the bar. Now these contexts are separated by little more than a share button. It’s an arrangement prone to human and technical error.
Facebook is making a bet that either A) users will master and trust this sophisticated set of privacy controls or B) they won’t care about sharing it all in one place. I’m closer to the latter mindset. With close to 800 Facebook friends and amid the site’s constant policy changes, I’ve rethought how I use the social network as a public space. I don’t share what I used to four or five years ago. And that’s OK.
Publication is “a self-invasion of privacy.” In an era when data can be duplicated and transmitted at virtually zero cost, you have to expect that any information you share can be used out of context, even by your friends. Assuming that technology will — 100 percent — protect your data is just as foolhardy as the assumption by the banking industry that financial innovation would help it manage risk.
