• Media Enquiries

    07505 448925(24hr)

Facebook

Facebook There seems to be quite a lot of surprise and shock online today at the news that Facebook Chat has a "bug" which potentially exposes users' conversations to viewing by others.

Whilst I understand that the bug is being ironed out, it's worth taking a moment to reflect on privacy and Facebook per se.

First of all, remember that Facebook's founder has a very different conception of what is public and what is private:

The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, doesn’t care about our privacy. A Facebook employee interviewed by The New York Times last week, when asked how his boss feels about privacy, responded: ‘He doesn’t believe in it.’

Zuckerberg believes privacy is no longer a social norm.

‘People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people,’ he said. ‘That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.’

That's a quite different starting point to that which I hold, and that is probably true of you too. Worth bearing in mind.

Secondly, remember that when you put something on Facebook – a picture, etcetera – you cede control of it to Facebook. Don't do that with anything you don't want to give away.

Thirdly, remember that there are settings on Facebook that enable you to restrict access to things to your friends / a more selective group. Use them. If you have elected to put material in a shared space, it's your responsibility to take advantage of those settings.

Fourthly, employers and prospective employers will use Facebook and social networking sites generally to research the activities of employees and putative employees. Who can blame them? It's information in the public domain, negative material there featuring an employee might reflect badly on them, and it might properly be regarded as doing due diligence in the modern age. So don't put anything up you wouldn't want your boss to see.

I'm not against Facebook, or social networking generally. You will see that Big Brother Watch uses Facebook (do please join our group!) and I personally enjoy using it, particularly to keep in touch with friends abroad. The point is this: accept it on its own terms and it is a useful and fun tool, but it can't be emphasised enough – Facebook is not a private place.

By Alex Deane

** UPDATE** Those with concerns about this topic would benefit from reading this at Wired.com or this at PC World – both reputable sources and interesting articles

**UPDATE** Interesting article on just this point.

**UPDATE** Some useful advice on protecting your privacy on Facebook and related sites (half way down the page). And 10 things to remember about Facebook and Privacy.

**UPDATE** An excellent graphic from the New York Times on privacy and Facebook

Posted on May 6, 2010 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Online privacy
  • Redacted

    Facebook is a product of university campus culture. Young people are genetically programmed to be gregarious, outgoing and to share resources within their peer group in a trusting manner. Starting out in life and lacking resources, they improve their survival chances as a result.
    As we grow older, more capable and more experienced, we tend to become more self-reliant, more discreet and more selective in our friendships. Often enough we become embarrassed at the indiscretions of our youth.
    If you are at home alone using the web, it is tempting to unconsciously imagine that “it” is somehow physically in your home, and so somehow the physical privacy of your home applies to it. In fact the reverse is true. Putting the Internet into your home, destroys the privacy of your home and replaces it with the public and intrusive nature of the Internet. Facebook exploits this to the maximum extent. Zuckerberg’s assumption is that if you install the Internet in your home or wherever, you can be assumed to be somehow fully cognizant of the violation of your privacy this facilitates, and have at least tacitly accommodated yourself to it.
    But I think that people who don’t have technical awareness probably have very little idea what is really going on. In general they see the “free” benefit that they get, and don’t ask questions about how come Facebook is worth so much money.
    Malcolm Muggeridge famously said of television that the point was to be on it rather than watching it. Similarly, with the current web, the point is to be running the website, not visiting it.

  • Slacker

    Never used Farcebook, never will – problem solved :)