Public debate needed on privacy
By Simon Grehan
How does one avoid the dreaded Facebook faux-pas?
Two teachers in Australia recently paid a high price to learn a lesson in privacy. They published pictures on their personal Facebook sites of themselves wearing mock school uniforms and posing suggestively on a bathroom counter.
While authorities cleared them of any wrongdoing, they were reminded to ensure the content of personal web pages was kept ‘private and secure’.
They didn’t need reminding. Outraged local newspapers had already published the pictures. No doubt, their students will be a great help to them in making sure they don’t forget.
Stories of ‘over-sharing’ on Facebook are rife. From the tired and emotional status updates (‘I am having a bad day’) to party pictures showing passed-out friends in the bathroom, people are leaving a trail of embarrassment online.
Anything you post has the potential to come back and haunt you. These ghosts in the machine tend to appear when you try to get a job, apply for a loan, or when you are trying to convince another adult that you are, despite first impressions, a mature and trustworthy individual.
On Bebo, your profile was either public or private. Either everyone could access your content or you could restrict access to your approved friends.
Originally Facebook didn’t have the public option. ‘‘No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the website who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings,” it said.
Today, you have no choice but to make certain information public and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook, justified this change by saying that people no longer had an expectation of privacy thanks to the increasing uptake of social networking. He justified the changes in how Facebook handled the privacy issue by saying that ‘‘privacy is no longer a social norm’’.
There is a growing backlash from Facebook users about this. Even the European Commission has entered the fray in recent weeks, criticising the erosion of privacy on Facebook.
Danah Boyd is a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society.
‘‘Wanting privacy is not about wanting to hide something,” she said. ‘‘It’s about wanting to keep control over who sees it and in what context. Often, privacy isn’t about hiding, it’s about creating space to open up. There are good reasons to engage in public, there always have been. But wanting to be in public doesn’t mean wanting to lose control.”
Most people are using sites like Facebook to connect with people that they know. They want to be found by friends. For this to happen they are happy to make personal information publicly available. But they also want to keep some information hidden.
They probably don’t want their work colleagues to see snaps of them on the beach. Unfortunately, it’s tricky to be visible to some and invisible to others.
Simon Grehan is the internet safety project coordinator with the National Centre for Technology in Education. For more information, visit www.webwise.ie
How to control privacy
Facebook is constantly pushing us away from our privacy, so what can you do to protect it? One way is to create a ‘friends list’.
Creating friends lists may sound judgmental, but it is the key step in controlling who can see your information. You can create as many lists as you like and give them whatever names you want. Names such as ‘family’, ‘work’ and ‘club’ are helpful. First, create the lists; you can then tweak the privacy settings to control each list’s level of access.
Here’s how you do it.
1. Choose the ‘Friends’ option under your profile picture.
2. Click the ‘Create a list’ button.
3. Enter the name of the list you are creating and select the friends that you want added to this list.
4. Go to your ‘Privacy settings’ page by selecting the ‘Privacy settings options’ from the account drop-down menu on the Facebook header. This area lets you configure aspects of how you can be found, who can interact with you, and who can access your personal information. In this case, you want to control who can access your photos.
5. Select the ‘Profile information’ option.
6. Choose the feature you want to limit access to. In this case, you need to configure your photo albums and photos of you that your friends upload. First, click the drop-down list in the ‘Photos and videos of me’ section and choose ‘Customise’.
7. Choose ‘Make tagged photos and videos of you accessible to your friends’ by choosing ‘Only friends’ from the list in the ‘Only visible’ section. Then, enter the name of the person or list you want to keep from seeing this feature. You will be prompted to create a list if you enter multiple names by hand.
8. You can follow a similar process to restrict access to your photo albums. Click on the ‘Edit settings’ button on the ‘Privacy settings/Profile information/Photo albums’ and decide who you want to be able to see your photo albums.
9. Repeat this process until you have created all the lists that you need.
