Privacy

How much of ourselves should we show the world? It's an important
question Facebook forces us to confront. Do I want you to know that I
am a longtime Fortune magazine journalist who covers technology and
is now writing a book about Facebook? Or should I tell you I am a fiftyseven-
year-old husband of an artist, father of a teenage girl, sometime
poet, and former union activist? Up to now, depending on the social
context, I would most likely have presented one or the other of these
identities to you. On my single Facebook profile, pretty much all is
revealed.
That is no accident. Zuckerberg designed Facebook that way. "You
have one identity," he says emphatically three times in a single minute
during a 2009 interview. He recalls that in Facebook's early days some
argued the service ought to offer adult users both a work profile and a
"fun social profile." Zuckerberg was always opposed to that. "The days
of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and
for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty
quickly," he says.
He makes several arguments. "Having two identities for yourself is
-an example of a lack of integrity," Zuckerberg says moralistically. But
he also makes a case he sees as pragmatic—that "the level of transparency
the world has now won't support having two identities for a
person." In other words, even if you want to segregate your personal
from your professional information you won't be able to, as information
about you proliferates on the Internet and elsewhere. He would say the
same about any images one individual seeks to project—for example,
a teenager who acts docile at home but is a drug-using reprobate with
his friends.
Zuckerberg, along with a key group of his colleagues, also believes
that by openly acknowledging who we are and behaving consistently
among all our friends, we will help create a healthier society. In a more
"open and transparent" world, people will be held to the consequences
of their actions and be more likely to behave responsibly. "To get people
to this point where there's more openness—that's a big challenge/7 says
Zuckerberg. "But I think we'll do it. I just think it will take time. The
concept that the world will be better if you share more is something
that's pretty foreign to a lot of people and it runs into all these privacy
concerns."
Most people would find these views discomfiting, and Zuckerberg
spends little time dwelling on the obvious downside of his vision. The
path to more openness is already strewn with victims whose privacy
was unwillingly removed. As one expert in privacy law recently asked,
"How many openly gay friends must you have on a social network before
you're outed by implication?" The problems with privacy on Facebook
typically arise when the comfortable compartments into which
people have segregated various aspects of their lives start to intersect.
You may attempt to project one identity for yourself on your Facebook
profile, but your friends, through their comments and other actions,
may contradict you.
Facebook is founded on a radical social premise—that an inevitable
enveloping transparency will overtake modern life. But through
strength of conviction, consistency, and strategic flexibility, Zuckerberg
has been able to keep Facebook true to this premise despite the pressures
that have come as it grows toward 500 million users. To understand
Facebook's history you must understand Zuckerberg's views about
what at Facebook they call "radical transparency." The company's most
painful moments have come because it took actions—like the launch
of News Feed—that suddenly exposed users' information in unexpected
ways.
With its mammoth scale, Facebook's very success has rendered
the premise less alarming. For better or worse, Facebook is causing a
mass resetting of the boundaries of personal intimacy. A large number
of Facebook's users, especially younger ones, revel in the fullness of
disclosure. Many users willingly fill out extensive details about their
career, relationships, interests, and personal history. If you are friends
with someone on Facebook, you may learn more about them than you
learned in ten years of offline friendship. Zuckerberg considers himself
a strong partisan for privacy rights and is proud that Facebook has
from the beginning offered users so many controls to determine who
sees their information. But he also strongly believes that people are
rapidly losing their interest in sequestering their data. So to keep the
service in line with what he sees as changing mores, he continues to
pust Facebook's design toward more exposure of information, even as
most privacy controls remain in place. This contradiction helps explain
the series of privacy-related controversies that have dogged the company
throughout its history—around the News Feed in 2006, Beacon
in 2007, the terms of service in early 2009, and the "everyone" privacy
setting in late 2009. In each case the company pushed its users a bit too
hard to expose their data and subsequently had to retreat.
But despite Zuckerberg's opinion there remain many ways in which
social conventions and personal behavior have not yet caught up to
Facebook's uncompromising environment. As it becomes harder to orchestrate
how others view us, does that make us more consistent, or just
more exposed? Longtime Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly
echoes his boss: "We've been able to build what we think is a safer,
more trusted version of the Internet by holding people to the consequences
of their actions and requiring them to use their real identity."
Outside experts take a different view. "At every turn, it seems Facebook
makes it more difficult than necessary to protect user privacy," wrote
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information
Center (EPIC) and a respected Internet watchdog, in a mid-2008
op-ed essay. Rotenberg believes that users are not given sufficiently
simple controls for their information, and that Facebook for all its belief
in transparency is not very transparent about what it does with our
information.
The amount of data about us that resides on Facebook also raises
public policy questions about privacy. Should this company—or any
one company—control and aggregate so much inside its own infrathe
facebook effect
structure? Should that be a job for government? People want to be in
command of their digital identity. Even if Facebook makes promises
about how it will treat our data, how can we be certain it will be used
as we say it should, not only now but in the future? Facebook makes the
personal data provided by users available to advertisers, in aggregated
form, for its own commercial gain. It and its business partners learn a
lot about us, but in general we know far less about it and exactly how the
company is using our data.
Privacy activist Rotenberg certainly thinks so. "Who will control
our digital identity over time?" he asks. "We still want control. We
don't want Facebook to control it." Facebook will certainly face repeated
backlash both from users and government regulators as its privacy
policy evolves.
The older you are, the more likely you are to find Facebook's exposure
of personal information intrusive and excessive. Many adult users of
Facebook have trouble accepting the idea that a single profile should
conflate their personal and professional lives. Some of them therefore
use it exclusively for genuinely personal information and try to avoid
accepting friends from work. Others keep personal stuff to a minimum
and connect indiscriminately with work colleagues and contacts, including
those they don't know well, aiming to turn Facebook into a
networking bonanza. My Facebook friend Robert Wright, fifty-two, a
respected nonfiction author who recently published The Evolution of
God, only went on Facebook reluctantly, to help promote his writing.
"Facebook requires an amount of disinhibition that is not natural to me.
I'm too self-conscious to use modern technology effectively," he says.
Even some of Zuckerberg's associates disagree with him. "Mark
doesn't believe that social and professional lives are distinct," says Reid
Hoffman, the early Facebook investor and creator of the business-only
Linkedln social network, which discourages inclusion of personal information.
"That's a classic college student view. One of the things you
learn as you get older is that you have these different contexts." Longtime
Facebook programmer Charlie Cheever (now departed from the
company) is another skeptic: "I feel Mark doesn't believe in privacy
that much, or at least believes in privacy as a stepping-stone. Maybe he's
right, maybe he's wrong." By "stepping-stone," Cheever means Zuckerberg
sees privacy as something Facebook should offer people until they
get over their need for it.
But some theorists of business applaud Zuckerberg's approach.
John Hagel, fifty-nine, a top researcher and consultant at Deloitte Consulting
and author of several bestselling books about the Internet and
business, believes presenting what he calls "a holistic version of ourselves"
is inevitable and probably beneficial. The reason, he says, is the
accelerating pace of change in business and society. "If we don't keep
acquiring new knowledge by participating in broader networks of relationships,
we'll be out of work," he explains. "But sustained relationships
must be based on trust, and that's harder if you're only showing a
part of yourself."
It's not that Zuckerberg believes in total disclosure. He wouldn't
reveal confidential goings-on at Facebook on his own profile. Hagel
too has his limits. "If I'm going to criticize my daughters I won't do it
on Facebook," he says. "On the other hand, it's valuable for people to
know I have two daughters because it creates more sense of who I am
as a person."
Some people thrive on the unbridled self-disclosure. Jeff Pulver, a
New York tech entrepreneur and consummate networker both on and
offline, does much of his business on Facebook and Twitter, using them
to send messages and arrange meetings. But he also is his real self in
such interactions, he insists. "I call it life 3.0," he says, "living more
and more of your life online and connecting in real ways. People who
have their shields up and don't make themselves vulnerable won't ever
understand why there's all this excitement about Facebook and Twitter
and social media."
In 2007, London-based technology expert Leisa Reichelt coined
the phrase "ambient intimacy" on her blog to describe the dynamics
of Facebook and other new services that enable individuals to freely
talk about themselves to groups of friends or followers. She defined it as
"being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and
the facebdok effect
intimacy that you wouldn't usually have access to, because time and
space conspire to make it impossible." The phrase struck a nerve globally
with students of social networks. A widely discussed 2008 article in
the New York Times Magazine by Clive Thompson detailed his own
experience with Facebook and Twitter. It explored the social implications
of ambient intimacy and was an argument for its virtues. "The
new awareness . . . brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where
everybody knows your business," Thompson wrote, approvingly.
The reality is that nothing on Facebook is really confidential. The company's
own privacy policy is blunt on this score. Any of your personal
data "may become publicly available," it reads. "We cannot and do not
guarantee that User Content you post on the Site will not be viewed by
unauthorized persons." To be fair, this language is intended primarily to
inoculate Facebook against potential lawsuits. The company certainly
tries hard to give you protections for what is meant to be confidential.
But many people do not understand or take advantage of Facebook's
often-complicated controls for their own information. That frequently
leads to misunderstandings and embarrassment.
Once people expose their real behavior on Facebook, when they
do something rash or stupid it is more likely to become "publicly available."
A young U.S. employee of Anglo-Irish Bank asked his boss for
Friday off to attend to an unexpected family matter. Then someone
posted a photo on Facebook of him at a party that same evening holding
a wand and wearing a tutu. Everyone in the office —including his
boss —discovered the lie. A political candidate in Vancouver, Canada,
withdrew from his race after a newspaper published a Facebook photo
showing two people happily pulling on his underwear. Notoriously,
Barack Obama's speechwriter Jon Favreau was publicly embarrassed
when a blog published a photo that showed him at a party with his
hands on the breast of a life-size cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton.
It had been posted on Facebook by one of his friends. And Facebook
disclosure can do more than merely embarrass you. A 2009 poll of U.S.
employers found that 35 percent of companies had rejected applicants
because of information they found on social networks. The number
one reason people weren't hired: posting "provocative or inappropriate
photographs or information." Colleges too are increasingly searching
Facebook and MySpace as they make admissions decisions.
Perhaps the Favreau incident was on President Obama's mind
when he spoke to a group of high school students in Virginia in September
2009. "I want everybody here to be careful about what you post
on Facebook," he said, "because in the YouTube age, whatever you do
will be pulled up later somewhere in your life. And when you're young,
you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff." Facebook membership
is becoming common among younger and younger children —it is
now commonly used by many eleven-year-olds and those even younger,
despite Facebook rules that users must be thirteen.
You don't have to be young to make mistakes there, however. Numerous
Facebook incidents have exposed unseemly behavior by people
in positions of responsibility. A guard at a Leicester, England, prison
was fired after colleagues noticed he was friending prisoners. A Philadelphia
court officer was suspended and reassigned after a juror in his
courtroom reported he had asked her to be his Facebook friend. Jurors
also have erred. Several verdicts in various parts of the United States
have been challenged by convicted defendants after they learned that
supposedly silenced jurors had posted remarks on Facebook while the
trial was under way.
Even people whose very job is to keep secrets are flummoxed by
Facebook's inducement to transparency. After the United Kingdom
announced in mid-2009 that Sir John Sawers would become the next
head of its spy agency, the Secret Intelligence Service (formerly called
MI6), the Daily Mail newspaper discovered a publicly accessible trove
of family photos that had been posted by his wife on Facebook. They included
images of holidays, family friends, and details that could reveal
where Sawers lived and how he spent his time.
Facebook transparency can jar intimate relationships. Many still
haven't gotten used to seeing and knowing so much about their significant
others. If your boyfriend shows up in photos with another girl,
it may mean nothing, but who knows? Worse is when someone learns
they are no longer a couple at all—by seeing a change in a Facebook
profile. The outcome can even be tragic: a British man allegedly killed
his wife, from whom he had recently separated, after he saw her relationship
status on Facebook change from "married" to "single."
Photos in particular can reveal, as they did for Sir Sawers, who
you spend time with, what you do with them, and where you go. High
school and college students essentially conduct their lives in the open
on Facebook. They conduct one-to-one dialogues with their friends on
their Facebook "wall" despite the fact that anyone else with access to
that profile can see it. This information is generally visible to anyone in
their school network.
A few dissenters in the young generation find the obsession with
Facebook self-presentation unhealthy. Shaun Dolan, a twenty-five-yearold
New York assistant in a media firm, has made a deliberate decision
to stay off the service. "My generation is unbearably narcissistic," he
said in an email to me. "When I go out with my friends, there is always
a camera present, for the singular goal of posting pictures on Facebook.
It's as if night didn't happen unless there's proof of it on Facebook. People
painstakingly monitor their own Facebook page to see what pictures
they get tagged in, or what picture would best represent them to their
friends."
Some call such behavior exhibitionism, or, as my longtime Fortune
colleague Brent Schlender puts it, a search for "digital fame." On Facebook
we follow the minutiae of our friends' lives the same way millions
follow Britney Spears in People magazine. Andy Warhol famously said
that "everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes," but on Facebook
what's limited is not how long you are famous but how widely. It may
be only among a circle of friends or school-mates. The Internet theorist
David Weinberger now posits that "on the Web, everybody is famous to
15 people."
Many young people don't seem to know when extreme self-exposure
becomes reckless. A twenty-year-old employee of Petland Discounts in
Akron, Ohio, posted a photo of herself on Facebook holding two rabbits
she had just drowned. Animal rights activists were outraged and
she was shortly arrested and charged with cruelty to animals. Teenagers
routinely post photos showing themselves and others using drugs
or drinking when they are not of legal age. At Amherst Regional High
School in Amherst, Massachusetts, a student gathered up pictures that
showed popular kids drinking and possibly using marijuana, then sent
them en masse to the school principal and others in the community. At
another high school, the principal went onto Facebook and suspended
all the athletes he saw in photos of a party who were holding bottles of
beer. (Those with red plastic cups were spared.)
Facebook interactions with teenagers are almost universally fraught
for adults, because the two generations have such fundamentally different
attitudes about what is proper personal disclosure. One San
Francisco executive was friended by her partner's teenage son. When
he took a summer trip to Europe he headed to Amsterdam and excitedly
told friends on Facebook all about his pot smoking. My friend was
torn—should she tell her partner, or would that be betraying the trust
given her by the teenager? A sixty-year-old in Virginia saw her nephew
swearing furiously on his Facebook page, but knew that his extremely
strict school could expel him for that. She confronted him about it herself
rather than telling his parents.
Since most teenagers still won't friend their parents, some families
have instituted a rule that as a condition of having a computer and
using Facebook the parents get access to their child's profile. They are
frequently distressed by what they find there.
How much Facebook should encourage users to reveal has been the subject
of debate throughout the company's history. "Our mission since day
one has been to make society more open," says marketer Dave Morin, a
member of Zuckerberg's inner circle. "That's what it's all about, right?
We help people be more open across more contexts. I think they have
to worry less all the time about being who they actually are." But Facebook
COO Sheryl Sandberg, thirty-nine, looks at it slightly differently.
"Mark really does believe very much in transparency and the vision of
an open society and open world, and so he wants to push people that
way," she says. "I think he also understands that the way to get there is
to give people granular control and comfort. He hopes you'll get more
open, and he's kind of happy to help you get there. So for him, it's more
of a means to an end. For me, I'm not as sure." Sandberg, fourteen years
Zuckerberg's senior, thinks it's fine if someone doesn't want to make his
or her life transparent.
Facebook does have a unique ability to help users control where
information about themselves flows. But it only works because of Facebook's
rigid requirement that people use their real names. If you weren't
confident people on Facebook were who they said they were, you would
not be able to selectively permit them to access your data by friending
them. You can restrict or amplify the extent of their view into your information,
as well as adjust how much information you see about them, by
putting them into groups called Friend Lists. These groups—for work,
family, college friends, or whomever—enable you to send information
to one group and not to others. However, only about 25 percent of users
actively use these controls, according to Facebook's chief privacy officer,
Chris Kelly. Many consider them maddeningly difficult to use.
Facebook at least potentially already has more ways for users to control
their data than just about any other site on the Net. Longtime top
company architect Adam D'Angelo says Facebook represents a "new
model for information" because of these controls. "Every piece of information
on Facebook is protected by restrictions that say who can see it,"
he says. "Certain sets of people can see certain pieces of information."
D'Angelo is right to note that such "granular" controls are found almost
nowhere else on the Net, partly because only Facebook has so much
information about who is doing the looking.
In late 2009 Facebook renovated its privacy controls and made a
major effort to explain to users how to put friends into groups and assign
various levels of disclosure to information. However, in the course of requiring
users to adjust their settings, the company set the default setting
on new controls to "everyone." Many users who were not paying attention
found their information more exposed rather than less, despite this
supposed "improvement" in privacy. The counterreaction was strong. A
group of privacy organizations led by Marc Rotenberg and EPIC filed
a formal complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, asking
for an investigation and penalties for Facebook. The complainants included
important groups like the American Library Association and the
Consumer Federation of America. Before the change Facebook executives
had spoken enthusiastically of it, saying it was likely to reassure
users about their data. Ironically, EPIC's suit asserted quite the contrary:
"Facebook's changes to users7 privacy settings disclose personal information
to the public that was previously restricted . . . These changes violate
user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook's
own representations/' The company had still not learned how to anticipate
and accommodate the concerns and attitudes of its users regarding
privacy. They apparently were not yet ready for too much transparency.
Zuckerberg more or less lucked into giving Facebook's users the
control they do have. In the beginning it became apparent that users at
Harvard shared so much about themselves because they knew that only
other Harvard students —members of Facebook's Harvard network—
could see it. So as Facebook evolved, the concept of networks grew with
it. All users were initially put into a network by default—for a university,
a high school, a workplace, or a geography. For years I was in the
Time Inc. network and also the New York one. You can see information
about other people in your networks, and they can see yours unless you
adjust your privacy preferences to prevent it. (I do, for both networks.)
But nobody outside the network can see your information unless you
explicitly permit them to. Now, in a key change, regional networks are
being eliminated. That will dramatically reduce the number of people
who can see most users' data if they haven't "friended" them.
For all the privacy challenges on Facebook, most people seem comfortable
with how it works. In a September 2009 survey it was found
to be the tenth-most-trusted company of any type in the United States
in a survey of 6,500 consumers by research firm Ponemon Institute
and TRUSTe, which verifies Internet sites. Facebook ranked ahead of
Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
But the influence of Zuckerberg's more extreme convictions remains
apparent as you walk Facebook's halls. Some there talk about
a concept they call either "ultimate transparency" or "radical transparency."
Since the world is likely to become more and more open anyway,
people might as well get used to it, the argument goes. Everything is
going to be seen.
The place where your information is most obviously transparent is
Facebook's photos application. That's where it is hardest to limit the disclosure
of information about yourself. You have no control over whether
someone posts a photo of you there. You do have the right to delete the
"tag" on a photo that identifies you and causes that information to be
disseminated to your friend list. However, generally by the time you
delete one, news of the tag has already been distributed in Facebook's
News Feed. (Any user can also adjust Facebook's privacy settings so they
cannot be tagged at all.) Photos are visible by default. Everyone on the
entire service can see them unless you deliberately adjust your privacy
controls, and most users don't.
Many users over the years have wanted Facebook to remove objectionable
photos of them taken by others. However, the company follows
a firm policy that while the tag is in your control, the photo is not. It
belongs to the photographer. Facebook has also, wrongly in my view,
resisted letting users approve tags of themselves before they are affixed
to a photograph and distributed to friends.
Proponents of radical transparency argue that while Facebook may
make it easier for people to see photos of you, there are many other sites
on the Internet where a photographer could also post those photos. So
Facebook is not facilitating anything that might not happen anyway.
"Mark's view is that Facebook had better not resist the trends of the
world or else it'll become obsolete," says the soft-spoken but passionate
Adam D'Angelo, who shares this view and with whom Zuckerberg has
discussed such issues since they were at Exeter in 2001. "Information
is moving faster," he continues. "That's just how the world is going to
work in the future as a consequence of technology regardless of what
Facebook does." Even Sheryl Sandberg takes evident pride when she
says, "You can't be on Facebook without being your authentic self."
Members of Facebook's radical transparency camp, Zuckerberg included,
believe more visibility makes us better people. Some claim, for
example, that because of Facebook, young people today have a harder
time cheating on their boyfriends or girlfriends. They also say that more
transparency should make for a more tolerant society in which people
eventually accept that everybody sometimes does bad or embarrassing
things. The assumption that transparency is inevitable was reflected in
the launch of the News Feed in September 2006. It treated all your behavior
identically—in effect telescoping all your identities, from whatever
context, into the same stream of information.
Those who speak their minds and show themselves on Facebook
sometimes do see themselves as waging small battles for openness and
transparency. Some of the controversies that result shine a spotlight on
closed-mindedness by adults. Kimberley Swann, a sixteen-year-old in
Essex, England, got a new job as a marketing firm office administrator.
She added some co-workers as Facebook friends. After a few weeks
she wrote on Facebook that her job was boring. Someone showed her
boss, who promptly fired her. "I didn't even put the company's name,"
said Swann in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. "They were just
being nosy, going through everything." Added a union official quoted by
the BBC about the widely covered incident, "Most employers wouldn't
dream of following their staff down to the pub to see if they were sounding
off about work to their friends."
A few high school students have gone to court to defend their right
to speak freely on Facebook. Katherine Evans, a student at Pembroke
Pines Charter High School in Florida, created a Facebook group
complaining that her Advanced Placement English teacher was "the
worst teacher Fve ever met." The principal learned of the group and
suspended her for three days. She then sued the principal in federal
court, arguing he had violated her First Amendment right to freedom
of speech.
Some young people —inadvertently echoing Zuckerberg—say it's
not a problem to have libertine images of themselves on Facebook because
as they get older, standards about such indiscretions will have relaxed.
While they are clearly gambling with their own reputations, the
inarguable wholesale movement toward self-disclosure on Facebook
and even in broader society gives this view some credence. President
Barack Obama openly admitted in his autobiography to having snorted
cocaine. Almost nobody cared.
It's understandable that people would want to share information
about themselves unreservedly and still feel protected from inadvertent
disclosures that might embarrass them. But the reason they can't
is embedded in the very reason people use Facebook. James Grimmelmann,
an associate professor at the New York Law School, explains
this dilemma in a 2009 article titled "Saving Facebook": "[Facebook]
has severe privacy problems and an admirably comprehensive privacy protection
architecture Most of Facebook's privacy problems are ...
natural consequences of the ways that people enthusiastically use Facebook."
He also writes, "There's a deep, probably irreconcilable tension
between the desire for reliable control over one's information and the
desire for unplanned social interaction."
One of Grimmelmann's central points is that the violations of privacy
that occur on Facebook are frequently the result of the behavior
not of the company but of people a user has accepted as a friend. To
prevent photos from being taken and posted on Facebook, some college
parties now ban cell phones and cameras. Some parties even have what
kids call "shot rooms," which are totally dark so nobody can take any
pictures of drinking or drug use. Athletes and other students concerned
about their image have also learned to quickly troll Facebook after incriminating
parties, seeking tagged photos of themselves that they, of
course, detag. But the only way those photos can be uploaded and the
tags affixed in the first place is if it's done by a user who is your "friend."
Grimmelmann calls this sort of thing "peer-to-peer privacy violations."
Because we use our real names on Facebook, we can be held responsible
for what we say. Many on the Internet take shelter behind
pseudonyms when they say something obnoxious, rude, or hateful, but
that's harder here. In Harrison, New York, a police detective was demoted
and forced to retire early in 2009 after writing on Facebook that
the election of President Obama meant "the rose garden will be turned
into the watermelon garden."
Facebook's culture of accurate identity is not foolproof. Many create
fake profiles for fun. At any time there are scores of profiles under
the name Haywood Jablomie, for instance. But such fakesters are usually
obvious. We are validated in our identity by the friends we have
on Facebook, and Haywood usually has few or none. Other fake profiles
are harder to detect. The Symantec security software firm conducted
an experiment in 2008 in which it created one for an attractive
young woman who supposedly attended a high school in Silicon Valley.
Within hours a number of boys at that school had sent her friend
requests, presumably because they wanted to date her. Sad incidents
have also emerged in which, for example, men have posed as attractive
women in order to get boys to send them photos of themselves nude or
having sex.
Celebrities also break the Facebook model. Microsoft chairman
Bill Gates shut down his personal profile on Facebook in early 2008 for
two reasons. He was getting more friend requests per day—thousands —
than even his staff could manage. But there were also five other "Bill
Gates" profiles pretending to be him, each with numerous "friends."
People with unusual names have a different problem. Facebook
often blocks their efforts to establish profiles in the first place. An Australian
woman named Elmo Keep, twenty-seven, was ejected from
Facebook until she sent the company copies of her passport and driver's
license. V Addeman, fifty-two, of Costa Mesa, California, tried to join
Facebook but was rejected by its software. He had a lengthy argument
with Facebook customer service to convince them that his legal first
name is a single letter. Others who have had difficulties include Japanese
author Hiroko Yoda, Rowena Gay of New Zealand, and people
whose names included Beaver, Jelly, Beer, and Duck. Even Caterina
Fake, the well-known co-founder of Internet photo site Flickr, couldn't
initially join Facebook. (Facebook's procedures for remedying such misunderstandings
were grossly inadequate until late 2009, when a more
formal appeals policy was inaugurated.)
The vast majority of users identify themselves accurately. That gives
Facebook some unique and practical capabilities. A man in Cardiff,
Wales, located a half brother he hadn't seen in thirty-five years merely
by searching for him by name in Facebook. Such family reconnections
are becoming almost routine in the age of Facebook.
Many people no longer exchange email addresses and cell-phone
numbers; they just look each other up on Facebook. This simple directory
capability is one of its most undeniable virtues. People who are not
on Facebook are increasingly seen, among some groups, as unreachable
by friends and acquaintances.
Is there a risk that once a fact about us has been revealed on Facebook
we may never be able to escape it? Will we always be remembered
as the drunken guy wearing the funny hat in some "friend's"
photo gallery? Will it become harder to evolve as people because opinions
about us have already hardened? From time immemorial, people
have moved to new towns and started over to escape some fact or impression
about themselves that made them uncomfortable. Will that
no longer be possible?
It makes sense to be cautious about how much of your data you
expose on Facebook. I myself abide by the simple "front page" rule.
I'm relatively comfortable exposing a large portion of my whole self to
scrutiny, so I put up extensive and accurate information on my profile
and actively participate in dialogue. But I try never to include anything
I would be devastated to find published on the front page of my local
newspaper.
Zuckerberg has acquired a surprising ally in his campaign for openness
and transparency—Ben Parr, the student at Northwestern University
who launched "Students Against Facebook news feed," the protest
group that catalyzed the big privacy crisis. In September 2008, Parr,
now a technology writer, effectively recanted. "Here's the major change
in the last two years," he wrote in an article. "We are more comfortable
sharing our lives and thoughts instantly to thousands of people,
close friends and strangers alike. The development of new technology
and the rocking of the boat by Zuckerberg has led to this change. . . .
News Feed truly launched a revolution that requires us to stand back
to appreciate. Privacy has not disappeared, but become even easier to
control—what I want to share, I can share with everyone. What I want
to keep private stays in my head."