Caveat Surfer

September 15, 2006

Last Tuesday, a post on blog.facebook.com made an exuberant announcement about the social networking site’s new “News Feed” feature. Facebook feeds, the author wrote, were “cool features… quite unlike anything you can find on the web.” Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, and the rest of his staff were clearly enthusiastic. Just three days later, though, after hundreds of thousands of Facebook users protested, Zuckerberg was forced to recant: “We really messed this one up,” began his public apology, which went on to explain how an even newer set of features would now allow users to exercise greater control over their personal information, or even opt out entirely.

Following Zuckerberg’s public statement, “Students Against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook),” the largest of the Facebook protest groups, posted a rather sanguine statement of its own on the group home page: “There was a mutual consensus between all parties and together, we made our voices heard and Facebook listened.” As far as that group’s 700,000-plus members seem to be concerned, the privacy threat has ended with a handful of opt-out checkboxes.

The Observer is not so sure. Online privacy risks, on Facebook and elsewhere, are as grave as ever, and students would do well not to be placated so easily. It’s interesting to note that in the case of the Facebook feeds, which generated so much outrage, no new information was being shared. All the feeds did was to make one’s already-public information visible in an easier-to-browse format. (Zuckerberg himself invoked this defense early last week.) Opting out of the feeds, therefore, is just a symbolic gesture: it doesn’t make your personal information more private; it only limits the ways that such information can be viewed. If the feeds were frightening last week, then you should still be scared today.

Facebook is not the only culprit, of course. Myspace.com, the fifth most-viewed website in the U.S., was recently targeted by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for “deceptive business practices” and installing spyware on users’ computers; the site’s parent company, Intermix Media, paid $7.9 million to settle the suit. Myspace was also recently purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, another company that has come under fire in the past for foul play and unfair business practices.

In August, AOL—in an astoundingly idiotic move—deliberately released 20 million of its users’ search queries to the public. Although they took down the data as soon as the media called them out on it, they were too late: opportunistic surfers had already downloaded the full data set and made it available elsewhere. Search for it now and you can see just how much of their lives people exposed to the search engine, in queries ranging from mundane (“calories in bananas”) to frightening (“help in writing a letter to a abusive narcissistic ex boyfriend”) to heartbreaking (“how to tell your family you’re a victim of incest”). The New York Times, in an investigative report, showed how it was possible to use the search queries, which were identified only with an AOL ID number, to track down the AOL customers in real life and match them to their searches.

Search engines and social networking sites are great tools (and great fun), and we’re not suggesting that you should avoid them entirely. But you should keep in mind a few facts: everything you do online is recorded in a database somewhere. Those databases are owned by large, often indifferent corporations, and the corporations sometimes make mistakes with your data. Things that you put online today, even secretly, could easily become public tomorrow, or next year, or in 2025 when you’re running for president. It’s up to you to find a balance between having fun online and protecting your privacy.