On private lives and public facebooks

Two posts in one day -- I must be on a roll. A good day of writing always generates other kinds of writing. Blogging counts, doesn't it?

I’m in the process of working up an article on Facebook in Canadian life (you can see the bibliographic information by looking at the sidebar on the right), which is inching towards completion. Since one of things I've been thinking through became newsworthy recently, I thought I'd post it here in the interest of topicality. Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated as I round this part of my article into shape.

Among the first things that people think about when they talk about Facebook has to do with the issue of privacy. Most recently, a group of students at the University of Ottawa's Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic brought a complaint to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, contending that Facebook violates a number of Canada’s privacy laws.

I’m always inspired when students enter into the public sphere with the intelligence and bravado offered by those at the CIPPC. And I’m not really interested in defending the company’s activities, particularly in light of stories about account termination and the fight over interoperability. Since I’m not a legal specialist on privacy, I’m quite sure that there are a number of important issues that the company needs to address, and if the CIPPC is able to accelerate that process, then that’s fine by me.

However, in the spirit of debate, then, I want to see what happens if we move the discussion about Facebook and privacy away from the legal realm and to consider Facebook not just as the popular website but rather as a derivation of a media form – public directories or catalogues that contain the names and faces of individuals which I'll call "facebooks" for short. If we consider things this way, might we consider that the student’s claims about privacy may run the risk of ignoring the history of media forms and, in the process, of painting the Internet and all of its applications with the same legal brush?

Here's what I'm trying to say:

Privacy advocates who criticize Facebook argue that the company's treatment of privacy is symptomatic of the broader problem of privacy online: which is, that most people are unaware of the fact that their own personal data is being communicated either to other users or to advertisers without their prior consent. This is one of the main concerns of the CIPPC report. On the other side of the discussion are those people who argue that, through their participation in sites like Facebook, users voluntarily agree to loosen the reins on their personal information. This is seen as perfectly alright by companies like Facebook and highly problematic for privacy advocates. This is usually how the media coverage of online issues plays out, which has the effect of reproducing the two straw men of media studies -- the manipulative capabilities of media coupled with laissez faire approaches to privacy allowing for the increased publicity of private life. When those things are placed in the context of younger users, we have a veritable holy trinity of media-related moral panics.

Clearly the company should be more upfront about the way it uses people’s data – and ensuring more transparency over that data seems like a laudable initiative.

But let’s keep in mind something here: facebooks as media forms, not just in their digital guise are inherently loose when it comes to privacy.

Facebook as media form, you ask? Well, we have quickly forgotten that before they became synonymous with social networking and web 2.0, the facebook had a print equivalent, called the facebook. These were books that were distributed to students on some American college campuses. Each school’s facebook had different contents, of course, but for the most part, they featured pictures of students and faculty, and various amounts of personal information, from addresses and phone numbers to date or place of birth. I am not sure about this (anyone can kindly correct me), but some facebooks might have contained more information than that.

The idea of the facebook was to serve as a social stimulant, to insure against the kind of shyness that new students might feel being in new surroundings. With a facebook in hand, students could theoretically introduce themselves to people that they did not already know. There were other uses for the Facebook on campus, namely to identify attractive or unattractive people and in some places, arranging for dates between mismatched people was part of a first-year student’s social experience. Consider the case of the story from the Yale Daily News published in 2001 (before the appearance of facebook.com), on the role of the facebook as part of the annual "screw dance" event for incoming students:

Screw dances are a special tradition at Yale where roommates set each other up with blind dates for a semi-formal dance, leaving the possibility that they can "screw" their roommates by giving them a bad date.... Your date might be someone a suitemate knows from class, but very often dates are picked from facebook photos. Sometimes even the most well-meaning roommates arrange dates with a facebook beauty only to discover that pictures are very, very deceiving. That photogenic date might operate on the social level of a seventh grader.

It is for this reason that student media outlets routinely warn students to be careful about how they choose which picture would appear in the facebook, since as those of us who tend to (unfairly) privilege visual media would like to say, image is everything.

So in its pre-digital form, the Facebook is like a yearbook-in-reverse, which itself, is a kind of catalogue of names and faces and, in some cases, more or less personal information about those contained in it.

Port Credit secondary school,with personal information, 1957. Image via

In addition, it draws upon other residual informational forms, like the phone book or yellow pages, the catalogue, the identity card, passport, and even the mugshot so that people can identify the identity of the accused:

image via

Simply put, each of these formats blend private and public domains through the use of photography and through making one's "profile" available to different kinds of readerships. The question of one’s privacy in “the facebook” is probably not much different than the question of one’s privacy in the phonebook – if you don’t want a crank caller, don’t list your number. What one does with your picture and information in the facebook – whether they draw on it, put it up on a wall, or put Brad Pitt’s body under my face, is beyond the control of the “face’s” originator. What is the copyright on this kind of information? What are the rules governing the use of this kind of data? I'll have to ask around.

Let’s also remember that using your personal information for profit isn’t a digital phenomenon – how does the yellow pages make money? By delivering an audience to advertisers through an old distribution technology – the big book on the doorstep. When an issue like account termination arises, as it did in the case of Facebook, the situation should not be dissimilar to that of de-listing your name and telephone number from the phone book. It should not mean that your number and address continue to be listed for 5 years, in case you change your mind.

Clearly, there are things about facebook.com which are different, but they are really matters of degree, namely that more information about yourself (if you should choose to elaborate upon it in your profile) is open for perusal and profit than previous versions of facebooks and that this information can be sent more quickly and across more channels than ever before. Again, though, this is a matter of degree, of scope, but it doesn't radically depart from the trajectory of media forms out of which the online facebook derives.

Remember that facebooks are supposed to facilitate conversation between people that do not know each other. However, in the digital Facebook, users predominantly create universes of relationships – or “friends” – based upon people they already know or once knew but wish to reconnect, and that being connected or friended from someone random is seen, at least in the circles I ride in, as gauche. Let’s keep in mind that it is probably only after the “parents”, that is those of us who are on Facebook and who are also over the age of 23, that issues around privacy have really taken hold.

So is what were are seeing here the backlash of the “juvenilization” of culture, where adults do things that their kids do but demand a kind of privacy that one didn’t have when they were younger? Or are we seeing the continued perpetuation of the old characters that always seem to dominate the way media technologies are framed? Maybe it’s the fact that the contents of “facebooks”, be they yellow pages or yearbooks.which were once seen as anodyne, now set off alarm bells in a society particularly sensitive about surveillance in the age of digital dissemination.

Then again, perhaps its neither of these conditions, and instead reflects the sense of disappointment we feel when media technologies fail in providing perfect communication. After an initial honeymoon period the proliferation of spam, reported privacy breaches, and celebrated cases of mistaken identity, fraud, and stalking have undermined Facebook’s innocence, and by extension, the innocence of youthful technologies that, like our own young people, don’t always live up to the lofty potential we expect of them.

What this means is that although the technologies are digital that the laws that govern internet sites, like Facebook, may need to take into consideration the laws governing the uses and abuses of their textual and analog precedents. Seeing Facebook.com as a part of a long line of books featuring faces and names might result in a more measured appreciation of the current incarnation's strengths and weaknesses and may modify our expectations on what facebooks can actually promise to their users when it comes to keeping their profiles under wraps.