Analyse critically the following statement by Mark Zuckerberg while comparing it to privacy issues raised by online social networking collaborative practices:
Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook’s new and simple controls of privacy settings that were a direct result of its users.
- “When people have control over what they share, they are comfortable sharing more. When people share more, the world becomes more open and connected. And in a more open world, many of the biggest problems that we face together would be easier to solve.” – Mark Zuckerberg
It is true that people would want to share more when they have more control over information, which complements democracy. Users can share selected information to selected groups of people, rather than everybody. However, one can question whether information masked in privacy will be effective in making the world a more open and connected place, because the information can only be made visible to a selected group of people. In my opinion, the emphasis is more on control rather than privacy. Better control over information would increase usability as opposed to no control. By doing so, connectivity increases and results in an efficient communication medium, which makes problems easier to be solved.
Zuckerberg goes on to state that the highest of user’s concerns is that there needs to be simpler ways to control information. He goes on by introducing 3 new controls of privacy setting as follows, in which I will discuss here.
1. A master control that can set who the information can be made visible to.
“Personal information is being posted online at a staggering rate…information that we want to keep on a short leash will escape from our control” (Solove 200: 29). This statement suggests that it is seemingly impossible to make sure that whatever information users want to keep as private will stay private. This is because there are always going to be numerous significant risks of having private information exposed to the public once it is posted up on social networking sites, such as Facebook, information can be sent wrongly, controls could be set wrongly, accounts can also be hacked into and some things are just beyond the control of users. For example, there was a case where a student’s (Brian) account was hacked by his friends, the hacker changes his ‘interested in’ to men, which was incorrect, changed his profile picture into something inappropriate, commented on the walls of Brian’s friends to further imply that he was homosexual and tagged Brian’s girlfriend in a photo of a donkey. This humiliated Bryan publicly (Debatin et al. 2009).
2. Reduced amount of information that has to be visible in order to use Facebook
Facebook users often post up too much personal information of themselves, Solove states that “Facebook…profiles provide an astonishing amount of information: 90.8 percent of profiles contain an image, 87.8 percent of users reveal their birth date, 39.9 percent list a phone number…and 50.8 percent list their current residence” (Solove n.d. :27). This can be very dangerous because users cannot control the postings, stalking and information extraction of third parties. Corrupted minds can still make use of the limited information to stalk or harm their victims. For instance, a stalker could have guessed the school of the victim from the profile picture alone, which makes it easy for the stalker to find him/her.
3. Control whether applications and websites can access information
According to ABC News (2010), Facebook has admitted it’s breach on privacy policies by allowing user’s information to be accessible to advertising companies. It was evident that many Facebook and other social networking site’s applications access information about members and their friends in order to build online tracking databases for companies. This is a major issue in privacy control because users wouldn’t know when unknown parties are accessing their information. The following ‘iceberg model’ illustrates the visibile and invisible part of Facebook usage. The small visible part represents the social interaction between innocent Facebook users. Whereas the invisible part represents the filtering of personal data from the interactions, for profit-making purposes (Debatin et al. 2009).
These new privacy controls are reducing the danger that accessibility of social information can attract. However, there are still many improvements tat can be done to make social networking a more secure medium of communication. “We want information to flow openly, for this is essential to a free society, yet we also want to have some control over information that circulates, for this is essential to our freedom as well” (Solove n.d.).
References:
