Facebook's misunderstanding of privacy will sink its business

Today's Hot Topic, 5th October 2011. Facebook's misunderstanding of privacy will sink its business

Does Facebook’s redesign threaten privacy in whole new ways? The social network’s habitués can now see what their friends are doing in real time. You think your colleague should be working on a proposal? So why has Facebook just reported that she is scrolling through someone’s holiday snaps? Your wife thought you were in your study working, but why is Facebook broadcasting to all that you have just clicked on an article about covering your tracks in infidelity? And now that everyone is watching what you are doing online, will you change your behaviour? Will Facebook become even more of a narcissistic projection, a play for influence amongst friends collected less for their friendliness than their importance? In other words, has Facebook overstepped the mark in its dedication to profit?

YES
Monetising friendships: that is Facebook’s business model, and every major change it introduces shows that it will always be prepared to sacrifice human feeling for a click-through buck. This time around, two changes to Facebook’s model have a dramatic impact. First, when you now click on a link in your newsfeed – say a story in the Guardian recommended by a friend – the Guardian can broadcast to all your friends that you have just done so. Second, the right hand side of your screen now provides a real-time ticker of what all your friends are doing at that moment on Facebook. Right now, I can tell who is reading, liking, commenting, befriending … With these two changes, Facebook has broken a fundamental rule of our evolving sense of digital privacy: the screen is a tinted window out onto the world, and one which we sometimes choose to open to let the world see in to some controlled part of our digital lives; but Facebook now proposes to take the tint away: your clicks are broadcast … your screen allows the world to perch on your shoulder as you surf and type. Once everyone understands this is going on, they will take fright and rebel. Facebook will pay for this faux pas in massive migrations away from its service.

NO
Tinted window! How naive! Companies have been tracking your web behaviour for years. That is the basis of web-advertising. Have you ever wondered why, after searching for some class of products on e-Bay, all of a sudden the sites you go to are full of advertisements for competing products? e-Bay and the Guardian, for example, share an advertising network that allows each site to know what sorts of purchases you’re interested in. In other words, the salesmen have been perching on your shoulder for a while. Facebook has only made that more transparent. At least you now know that what you do on FB is done, effectively, in public. Once you understand that, you can just relax and get on with enjoying yet another great free service from an advertising-funded company.

YES
What a binary view of the world these Facebook defenders seem to have. You either like or not; you are a friend or not; and now, information is either public or private. There is nothing else, we are told, in the world of netizen-king. But this is not how we are: friends are not family, family are not colleagues, colleagues are not neighbours, and none of these are customers. Facebook is trying to turn every relationship into a single one, and specifically one that allows itself to become the convener of an endless Tupperware party. If Facebook had its way, we’d have just one relationship with our entire address book and it would be wholly conducted in a bazaar owned and operated by Zuckerberg and friends. Think of the digital space by analogy with zoning in a city. Yes, there are commercial high streets with alluring, advertising-filled shop windows. But there are also residential streets, public gardens, town halls, parliaments and more – all spaces which imply a completely different attitude to people in them than the high street. Facebook would have the entire digital space become the high street. It is because this is such a preposterous vision of how we will organise the digiverse that the alternative – Facebook’s demise – seems much more likely.

NO
Fine. Facebook is becoming everyone’s very own high street – call it the miStreet, maybe. That’s quite a good model for it, in fact. All over Spain, citizens traditionally come out in the evening for a paseo, a stroll down the main street. Everyone looks at everyone, stops to exchange gossip and news. It was a sort of Facebook for the traditional Mediterranean society. But just as there is a space in life and in the city for the paseo, so there is a corner of the web for the miStreet. Facebook wants to occupy that bit of real estate because it is clearly commercially valuable. But other services have and will colonise other pieces that fit into different aspects of life. Facebook’s choices define the sort of space it is, and the use that we will make of it. You don’t have to believe that excellence in one space will translate into ownership of another – don’t take netizens for sheep!

YES
This is the preposterously naive and Californian view of the empowered netizen-consumer: we all understand how these services are shaping our lives; we will make informed and sensible decisions about them; the net will eventually reflect the harmonious order of every good West Coast tech-hippy life. But we all know that this is a dangerous abstraction: each choice by one person affects the choices of others, especially when it comes to social networks. We become informed about the public world by reading our Facebook newsfeed because that is where those we know and trust are recommending reading to us. But now that we are being broadcast in our reading, we will change what we read. Worse still, the new timeline feature is set to become a stored narrative of your life in the digiverse – a searchable archive of all you have seen, read, clicked on; of your friends’ important moments; of your purchases, of course … Remember: history is written by the victors … or, in the web-age, the victors are the ones who can write the histories. Extirpating ourselves is not a simple matter of avoiding the high street and the paseo but going instead to the cafe and the library. When everyone is on the paseo, that is where you have to be in order to avoid hermetic exile. Again, it is the optimistic position to see Facebook as destroying itself because it is always trying to close a sale, whatever the context; the pessimistic view would be that we indeed become transformed into the subjects that Facebook would love us to be.

NO
And here we have the nub of the sub-Foucaultian armchair sociologists who think that the social construction of identity is a license for lazy pot-shots at the exciting future that the internet is building. There is a great denial of agency in all these criticisms: supposedly, our only choices are either to join Facebook and become putty for Zuckerberg’s evil genius; or to leave Facebook en masse and see it crumble as a business. The joyful and exciting reality is that we and Facebook and any number of other companies are co-creating the digiverse and we will adapt both it and ourselves to the new – yet another chapter of surprise and excitement in the history of human progress.

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