REPORT: Facebook and the New Age of Privacy

It¶s said that opposites attract. In social media, it¶s quite the opposite. The idea of privacyand publicity are in fact at odds with one another. And at the heart of the matter, onesocial network is caught in the crossfire of sharing information and TMI (too muchinformation). The line that separates privacy and openness remains undefined as itcontinues to shift as individuals learn important life lessons about the benefits and risksof living in public. As we evolve into a more open society, the economic value of privacy has inverted.Years ago it was inexpensive to maintain a sense of controlled solitude and expensive toearn public attention. Now the cost of publicness is far lower than the expense of cultivating privacy.The state of privacy online, or perceived lack thereof, is consuming media headlines andstatus updates worldwide and webwide. What might appear to represent the sentimentof the people, may also in fact, represent media sensationalism. As you¶ll see,conversations on Twitter regarding privacy fueled discourse and debate as well asawareness of the issue. At the heart of the privacy debate is Facebook and its ongoingseries of changes to its privacy policy. This latest PeopleBrowsr report examines theextent of Facebook privacy story between Facebook¶s F8 conference in April 2010 andnow.

The Privacy Woes of Facebook

Over the years, and at the behest of mainstream and new media, Facebook seeminglymonopolized all conversations related to privacy concerns. In 2007, Facebookintroduced Beacon, an ad system that provided third-party websites with a script that fedthe activity of users back into Facebook feeds. After a very public backlash and a classaction lawsuit, Facebook changed its stance.In December 2009, Facebook introduced a privacy overhaul that was met withimmediate criticism. After a series of very public complaints, privacy rules wereoverhauled once again, this time with the input of its users. The examples continue anddate back several years.On April 21st 2010 as the world watched, Facebook introduced us to its Open Graph atits F8 developer event in San Francisco. The announcement was met with cheers and jeers, what was clear, Facebook and its leader Mark Zuckerberg, were leading us into a

new, more public and open Web and way of life. We were moving beyond the point of noreturn.Open Graph is nothing short of a game changer, serving as a new platform that turns the500 million user strong social network into a personalization engine and a fledgingcontextual network that connects relevant information, content and people. Now with theuniversality of ³Likes´ inside Facebook and around the Web, your Facebook personaand social graph becomes portable. The price? Your privacy is traded for openness. Thebenefits? A living searchable Web that¶s personalized to you and your contacts andthose topics that interest you.By placing the power of ³Likes´ within clicking distance, users can literally set thefoundation for the content and people to which they¶re introduced in Facebook and atpartner sites. Hyperlinks are becoming Peoplelinks.For those who were reluctant to say ³ah´ to the opening of the social graph, they wereforced to manually dam the rivers that carried personal information into the socialstream. Users deemed it too difficult to do so, and as such, Facebook simplified theprocess for erecting walls between you, your activity and relationships, and the rest of the Web. Now that Facebook puts its users in control of privacy, what they see andwhat they share is wholly defined by their user settings. The more open the preferencesthe more friends within the social graph see and learn about you. Additionally, it¶s howFacebook and Facebook¶s outside partners personalize your experience. Nevertheless,you are in control of the impressions that others form as well as the level of customizedinformation and content you see in Facebook and outside apps and networks.

earching Public Conversations to Research Privacy

There¶s an aura of irony here in researching online privacy and using a very openinformation network to analyze public conversations. While the content studied here isbased on subject matter and not tied to individuals per se, one can expect that publicprofiling in social networks will soon soar. In many ways, we are already seeing theresults of personalized marketing and advertising and the improvement of products andservices based on the choice words and sentiments shared by like-minded groups andinfluential individuals online.

Twitter is a unique beast when it comes to social media. It is a network that¶s not onlyopen, it is also indexed by search engines and open to APIs. Your profile, updates, andyour social graph or as Twitter refers to it, your ³interest graph,´ is open for analysis andperception freely or for the price of admission set forth by third-party developers whohouse this data. Twitter COO Dick Costolo once stated that Twitter avoided privacyconcerns and discussions as people registered for the service with a full understandingthat their conversations took place in a very public and visible forum. While true, I¶dargue that as individuals take to social media to broadcast their observations andexperiences, they are learning the true meaning of privacy and going public as they go.Judging by the numbers, Costolo is indeed right. Twitter users aim their attention atFacebook when discussing privacy and not Twitter.