Socialmedialand

Posts Tagged ‘social media privacy’

With everyone having mild panic attacks over the recent change in Facebook’s Terms of Service (TOS) – it got me thinking about the bigger picture here. This isn’t the first privacy fiasco for Facebook (we all remember beacon right?), nor the first privacy fiasco at all – Google’s street view maps are great, but what if you’re in the street view, doing something you don’t want people to know? (All 15 pics are worth looking at btw) And no matter what our political viewpoint is on it we all know that, as citizens in the US, privacy laws have been changing in general in recent years.

What is privacy when it comes to social networks and the interwebs at large and what are my expectations of privacy online?

This might go back to what I said in a recent post on being real, but when I personally put things up on the internet, I have a vague understanding that I’m losing any real control over it. I feel like everyone should present themselves as they really are in every instance, and that authenticity is what matters. I know that’s not a legal argument or anything with real weight but I think it is valid on some level. If you have something you’d like to keep private, consider emailing it, or sending it in a private message rather than posting it in a public place. Just a thought.

Now onto what happened recently and its implications: Facebook changed its TOS by removing a few lines that makes it so when you leave the service, and delete your account, your content will still be on the network.

Cue freak out.

Now, calm down. ZDNet posted this great explanation about how we’re all missing the boat on what really matters in this situation. The twist is that the change itself makes sense. Shocker I know. But think about it. If my best friend from college, who posted all our pictures and sent me messages and gifts on random holidays that bring back memories of our inside jokes, randomly decided that she needed to delete her account to go after that job in some very traditional corporate place – what happens to me? Do all the pictures I’m tagged in disappear? My wall deflates, my bumper stickers disappear, and my gifts vanish? That’s no fun for me, because that content is really just hers, it’s also mine because she shared it with me. That’s why they changed it.

The real problem is how they changed it. They just did it. They wrote a little blog post about it, that they didn’t publicize (I’m willing to wager that the average Facebook user doesn’t check the Facebook blog on a daily basis or have it in their RSS feed). Why didn’t they send out a note or a message or an update? They also wrote in a stipulation that by signing in, you accept the change – but I didn’t know that before I signed in. The problem here isn’t that they changed the TOS, they can explain to me why and I can understand. The problem is that they didn’t communicate that to us. They assumed that the users probably didn’t need to know because if you delete your account and the pictures you tagged other people in stay there on their account, you probably don’t care. And for the majority that’s true. But so what? That doesn’t lessen your responsibility to include the community in the changes and to let us know what’s going on. We do have rights. We give up some of them voluntarily to participate in the site – but you should let us know what the deal is. If it’s important maybe I’ll spend time deleting the things I don’t want left behind before I leave (AN: I’m not leaving, this is hypothetical).

Facebook is getting a little too big for its britches right now – they assume that they have full control and have a history of making major changes without consulting the crowd. The new vs. old Facebook is the only time I can think of that they did it right. It’s weird, but maybe the biggest social network needs a crash course on social media theory and practice.

So, what next?

Like I mentioned before, this isn’t the first privacy issue we’ve come across in social and new media and I bet it’s not the last. The key is the same as it’s always been. We are a community, I’ve said before that our social networks are like the nations we are citizens of which means their privacy statements are our constitutions and in America we once rebelled against the idea of “taxation without representation.” It’s the same principal – we need representation. We need to know what the laws and rules are in our networks and we need to know when they change, we need to have a voice over when, where, how, why that happens.

Ask us.

 In that spirit – I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

EDIT: I ran across this link to a story on linking privacy (Is it ironic that I just linked to it?How many times do you think I can say “link” in this paragraph?) where a law firm sued a website for linking to the public profiles of a few of their lawyers who were involved in various news stories. I couldn’t believe it was actually settled instead of thrown out. How can a link to a public page be considered privacy infringement? One legal blogger agrees with me (I hope it’s ok that I linked to him) – what do you think?

Side note: I guess I was right about the Facebook TOS not being the last privacy issue we come across…it’s been, what, 15 minutes?

UPDATE:

Facebook is finally asking the community to join the conversation.