Facebook’s Beacon and Boundary States
It’s been interesting to watch the critiques of Facebook’s Beacon roll in. Erick Schonfeld, official Techcrunch voice of reason, points out the somewhat absurd conjecture that social ads are more relevant. Across the web, there seems to be general agreement – social input helps in times of need, like when we need a recommendation of a good mechanic, but other times it’s just spam. Today I want to explore Beacon from a slightly different angle – I want to look at how Beacon will affect Facebook users’ conceptions of privacy and space.
Let’s first flash back to the Facebook Newsfeeds. When Facebook introduced the Newsfeeds, there was a tremendous backlash as users were confronted with the privacy implications of the tool. Facebook responded in a typical corporate fashion, stating that no new information was being put out there, people could see your information if they visited your profile, etc. Of course, what Facebook failed to realize is that privacy is both qualitative and quantitative. Privacy theorist Irwin Altman describes our conception of privacy as boundary states; Facebook reshaped a number of these boundaries with Newsfeed. Helen Nissenbaum explores it another way, framing privacy as contextual integrity – we project ourselves and what we share into contexts; Facebook forced us to realize that our friend/disclosure context was not just the 5-10 people we interact with daily, but the 500 other “friends” we’ve added through the years.
Therefore, Newsfeed wasn’t just a privacy shift in Facebook, it was a cultural shift. A friendship, the primary action in the site, was no longer the one-time exchange of social capital; it became an invitation to be present in a user’s day-to-day activities. This remapping of friendship was the locus of the revolt, as millions of users pondered just who was seeing their information on an everyday basis. As one might imagine, among these users privacy and self-regulation shot up; I observed a 20% jump in privacy between samples in 2006 and 2007.
Beacon introduces another of these cultural shifts. In the case of Newsfeed, Facebook users were forced to reconceptualize their audience. Nissenbaum’s Contextual Integrity theory explains our reaction to Newsfeeds; the reshaping of privacy norms is a traumatic event. Beacon is somewhat different, so I want to lean on Altman for my explanation. With Beacon, Facebook’s boundaries are remapped. Users will be forced to realize that their Facebook identity “follows” them through the web. As a result, Facebook users will be forced to reevaluate all of their activities on the social web.
Let’s not fall into the quantitative privacy misdirection. With Beacon, you’ve got control over what you share; with careful control, you can even prevent any Beacon stories from showing up in your newsfeed. Just as with Newsfeed, there isn’t a quantitative privacy shift. But there is a very, very significant qualitative shift.
Due to the general “walled garden” nature of the web, we naturally map our behavior into domains. We can be one person on Facebook, another person on Myspace, and yet another person at Flickr, YouTube and Digg. The ClaimID-type idea of “profile linking” is still very new, with only a very small number of us wanting to map a consistent identity between sites.
For the past six months or three years, we’ve been cultivating our persona in Facebook. We’re used to boundaries, we know where Facebook ends, and we can segment Facebook as a “part” of our social web experience. With Beacon, Facebook users will be forced to confront the interconnection of their Facebook identity with the social web; the boundaries that existed previously no longer apply. Altman argues that our cognition of privacy boundaries are based on observable, mappable phenomena. We know that our homes are private because people can’t see through walls. With Facebook Beacon, the walls that we used to understand are gone – our identity, designed for a single place with focused interaction, now follows us everywhere. This is extremely significant.
In a class discussion yesterday, Terrell Russell summed it up nicely: The social web now has landmines. When we browse sites, we’re forced to wonder “Will this show up in Facebook.” And what happens when the momentary flux in Facebook’s systems gets your settings wrong, and something you didn’t expect shows up in your Newsfeed? I don’t want to base my argument on contingencies; we’ll be mindful of accidential information leaks, but the major problem with be our confrontation with our “Facebook selves” anywhere and everywere. Even though Zappos or Epicurious may not have our “data”, we’ll be constantly reminded that they “know of” our Facebook selves.
The Facebook team stakes its value proposition on the notion that our Facebook identities are our real selves. This is false; because we use our real names, we are not our “real selves.” Identity is performed and crafted in Facebook; our selves are as real in Facebook as they are in Myspace and Friendster before. Beacon challenges this notion, reminding us anywhere and everywhere we go that we’ve got to keep our identity performance up.
Critical point, marketers: If our identity performance infects all of our buying decisions, will this help or hurt your sales? That is, if I had to think about what everyone thought of all of my purchases, would I self-regulate my purchasing behavior? Would I treat myself less, buying less guilty-pleasure stuff? Do I actually want to have to go through this decision process every time I buy anything, being forced to process what my friend group will think about me?
Just like Icarus flying too close to the sun, Facebook’s fallacy of “real” identity is leading the company into very dangerous territory. Facebook believes in the transparent society; what they fail to realize is that the transparent society only benefits the power elite. With Facebook’s Harvard and Stanford pedigrees, its easy to see how groupthink and cultural preconceptions inform their decision making. Beacon is an inflection point. As we are confronted with the loss of boundaries, our notions of privacy and space will be reshaped. We’re about to wade into some dangerous water – Facebook and its marketing partners should pay close attention.
Update: Via Brian Oberkirch, directions on how to block Beacon. Anyone know how to implement this block with NoScript?
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