Fred StutzmanThoughts about information, social networks, and privacy

This morning, millions of college students are thinking differently about their online identity. The reason? Facebook, the industry-leading college social networking website, introduced “feeds” last night. Feeds are pretty simple – they’re a running list of what you’ve been doing in the Facebook. For example, if you add a friend, update your relationship status, upload photos – this all gets dumped into a feed, viewable by anyone that can view your account.

The logic that went into such a feature is easy to explicate. When you’ve got 200-400 friends in Facebook, it is impossible to keep track of them all. Remember when we had to keep track of 30 blogs manually? It sucked. And we solved that problem with RSS – let the updates come to us. Facebook has taken this notion and applied it to our lives. Facebook knows that its userbase uses the service to “keep up” with people – continuous social research, if you like – so this addition appeals to very base motives of Facebook users. Clearly, this is an idea that sounded great on paper.

In reality, however, this gets messy. Let’s get some background. First, I’m convinced that many young users of Facebook don’t look at the site as a social networking service per se. This generation has been socialized on Xanga, LJ and forums – they are comfortable and used to the idea of being on a social website. The Facebook simply represents another game-like social website that they are on – nothing more. Second, digital identity, like that presented in the Facebook, thrives because it is temporal. You can change your identity at the drop of a hat – you can become a liberal or conservative at the push of a button, change your interests an hobbies on a whim. The point is, you’re always presenting the identity you want to present – you never have to worry about the identity you used to present.

I believe that identity disclosure is so high in the Facebook for the first reason I cited – students see this as a game, something that is qualitatively less than real. Students disclose lots of real information, but they also disclose lots of false information. The key to winning in the Facebook is maintaining a good mixture of the real and false information. Implicit in this is the reality that you can always change the fake information, when you want – you can rewrite history at any time.

This morning, millions of students were shown that they can’t actually rewrite history. Everything they do, all of the groups they join and interests they state or friends they make – it is all being recorded. Not only is it being recorded, it is being presented as content to other users of the Facebook. The Facebook is no longer just a current method of identity presentation, it is an archive of our digital identity. This is a cold, hard reality for students, and you’re seeing a lot of public venting of discomfort as a result.

So lets prognosticate a little, and see what might happen to the Facebook, now that entire userbase is acutely aware of the fact that everything they do is being recorded and shared with the world.

• First, I believe this move will cause a lot of mental discomfort to students who hadn’t really thought through online identity. They will be presented with all of the changes from their friends and realize that they, too, are having every minute change in their identity fed to hundreds of others.
• Second, I believe students will be forced to rethink how they socialize in the Facebook. Facebook has reached a critical mass among college-age students, and my research has shown that many students on the Facebook now use the service heavily for out-of-network connections. Their cousins, old friends, brothers and sisters are on the Facebook. Knowing that everything they do will be presented to their entire network will have a chilling effect. Here’s an example: A student posts a change to their profile late at night, as a joke for a friend. That student knows that likely, only a few people will see his change, and he can revert it in the morning. With the new Facebook, that change is now broadcast to the entire network – and it is saved in an identity archive – the feed.
• Finally, I believe this change will wake students up to the realities of sharing identity information online. Granted, it won’t wake them up much, but it may just convince them that these sites aren’t really games. It may also convince them to think of the future repercussions of sharing information anywhere – not only in the Facebook but in Bebo, Myspace, Hi5, Xuqa and the like.

Personally, I don’t believe this is a horrible move for Facebook. They took a pre-existing model (RSS) and applied it to identity. What they may not have done is thought deeply about how their users approach identity. People love exploring each other, but we don’t want to leave traces behind. We don’t want people to be able to see if we’ve viewed the profiles of others. We don’t want people to know if we decline their friend requests. Social networkingsSystems must enforce basic structural rules for trust to occur, I believe “not leaving traces behind” may turn out to be one of those rules.

Of course, Facebook has stated that feeds are subject to all privacy controls. You can opt out of the system totally, or on a case-by-case basis. However, opting out of sharing in these services, where sharing is incentivized, creates issues of inequality in the system. Students who opt-out aren’t playing the game fairly, more or less.

Reaction to the service has been mixed, with Techcrunch’s Arrington giving a neutral review (mostly a recounting of the features). The comment thread was less friendly. Over on the developer forum, a self-selected bunch of power users are engaging in threads with names such as “Why are people allowed to stalk every move I make now” and “Stop it – I almost cancelled my account today!”.

While an interesting move, I do believe that a gradual rollout or more in-depth consideration of user’s privacy concerns would have benefited Facebook. The Facebook seems to be run by a group of extremely determined Facebookers (many were early and full-immersion adopters), so it is possible that groupthink effects have caused the team to lose some focus of the average user.

The takeaway here is that Facebook, like it or not, has brought to bear a very real issue in online identity. Everything we do in public or semi-public spheres can be tracked and chronicled. We don’t see our digital footprints as much because systems haven’t cropped up to collect them, but collecting them is trivial. Facebook has simply put one of those systems in front of us – wrapped up nicely as a feature – but it isn’t hard to see the reality. As we grapple with this reality – that our privacy is only a construct of a system, and that our identity can be tracked and chronicled – how will students change their behavior? We’re really only at the tip of this iceberg, but with Facebook’s new features, we’ve accelerated this discussion substantially.

P.S. – I should also note that Facebook now has a official blog, which you may want to check out. Hopefully they’ll add an RSS feed soon.

Tags: archives, facebook, identity

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 11:13 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.