What Facebook Feed should have taught us about the internet.
By Ezra Klein
Tuesday September 12, 2006
I’m outing myself: I’m an unabashed Facebook Feed supporter, one of the brave few who recognized the startling clarity and wisdom of Mark Zuckerberg’s latest vision. I only wish Zuckerberg had retained the courage of his convictions, because, frankly, the internet needs not just Facebook’s Feed, but many, many more imitators.
As Campus Progress’s Graham Webster was the first to report, Facebook’s Feed feature—which aggregates the various friend requests, picture additions, wall scrawlings, notes, status changes, and group expansions of all your friends onto your Facebook front page – sparked instant outrage among the social networking site’s members. Within a couple of days, 800,000 people had joined just one of the multiple groups protesting the changes. By then, the media had noticed the groundswell. By the end of the week, the site’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had partially backed down, allowing users to opt-out of many features of the hated feeds.
What struck so many Facebook users about the feature was not, as they might have thought, the ultra-public record of their actions. It was the accessibility of that record. With the Feed implacably recording your every move and pasting it atop the home pages of your friends, the already staggeringly public nature of the site became suddenly and unpleasantly apparent. Did you really want your girlfriend to know you’d posted a flirty comment on an ex’s wall? Did you want to know that she’d recently become friends with her freshman year hook-up? Did you really need to see the pictures your little sister posted of her first keg stand?
But even without Feed features turned off, none of those images, actions, connections or writings are any less available to you, or any of your friends. That information is still out there, easily accessible to anyone you’ve added as a buddy. Your girlfriend can see when your ex replies on your wall, your sister’s exploits are immediately apparent when you glance at her page. A bit of clicking may be required, but there are no obstacles deterring the semi-determined, or even simply bored, sleuth.
What the Feed did was shatter our illusions of online privacy. On our end, an e-mail sent, or a comment left, or an online action taken are tennis balls tossed into the abyss—once thrown, they’re forever gone. Or so it feels. But in fact, our private actions are both public and permanent, forever cached on Google, recorded in community sites, or retained in inboxes. A few examples:
Last week, a web developer named Jason Fortuny decided to play a little prank: He posted on Craigslist’s “casual encounters” section as a submissive women seeking some hot sex. He soon had 178 replies, which he posted, in full, with all identifying details, explicit pictures, personal phone numbers, and names included. Already, coworkers have been recognized and relationships wrecked.
Less dramatically, a New Republic writer named Lee Siegel recently took to the comments of his own blog to defend himself against angry interlocutors. He did so under the pseudonym “Sprezzatura,” a supposed acquaintance and admirer of Siegel’s. Commenters dutifully unmasked the charade and various details available within The New Republic’s computer system proved the fraud. Siegel’s blog was discontinued, but his embarrassment was not forestalled: Google caches of Sprezzatura’s comments were rapidly produced, and gleefully reprinted across the blogs. (I’ve written about this before.)
All of this explains why, in part, I was in favor of the Feed. There is currently an asymmetry of information on the net: Users don’t quite conceive of the permanence and transparency of their actions. The Feed corrected them, and they didn’t like it. But that’s precisely why I did. Newly confronted by the knowledge that their online actions really are public, users may show greater caution in what they say, or do, or write. Finally disabused of the illusion of online privacy, web surfers may begin to self-police their online actions, always cognizant of a blog post or e-mail’s potential reemergence. The Feed would make them almost as careful as they should be.
For now, the Facebook riots are quelled. But privacy will not be enhanced, online confidences no better protected. Without the Feed, users will again be lulled into complacency, certain that their sense of an action’s finality accords with its actual obsolescence. They will be wrong. And some of them will pay.
Ezra Klein is a writing fellow at The American Prospect. His blog is at www.EzraKlein.com.
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Comments
Great article. Personally, I think that colleges and universities need to start addressing Facebook during freshman orientation. Students need to understand that they shouldn’t be posting personal information on these social networking sites. My generation has basically signed over it’s privacy to corporate America.
— Ben Waxman - Sep 14, 09:28 AM - #Dartmouth sort of addresses Facebook during orientation – last year, during my own first weeks on campus, the older students addressed it quite well in our freshmen outdoor trips orientations. Not official school stuff, but something 90% of us attended. Other schools have addressed it more, I’ve heard.
I sort of support the feed, but there are some privacy controls available for a lot of your information, so there’s nothing wrong in making more.
— Nathan E. - Sep 14, 06:53 PM - #This is an enlightening explanation of why the outrage over the Feed should lead people to change their own conduct—and not just demand Facebook change its policies.
— AriM - Sep 14, 07:26 PM - #