The Internet Has Added You as a Friend

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Sometime in the next few weeks, Facebook is going to unveil a new privacy policy aimed at getting users to share information with everyone on the Internet. It is the next move in Facebook’s campaign to unseat Twitter as the web’s preferred venue for microblogging. But in its effort to out-tweet Twitter, Facebook is asking its users to make far more of their personal information accessible to many more people. The new privacy rules thus present us with an opportunity to ask a question that has been posed many times before: With how many people are you comfortable sharing your photos, updates, and inside jokes?

The company that Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06-’07 started in his Harvard dorm room prevailed against lesser social networking sites like MySpace and Friendster because only on Facebook could you be reasonably assured that pictures of you masterfully performing a keg stand were viewable exclusively by your college friends. It was an added plus that your inbox wasn’t also bombarded by spam from voyeuristic websites.

Facebook has maintained the pretense, as was noted in a Techcrunch blog post on the new privacy policies, that they want users to publicize more information in order to help differentiate between people with similar names, thereby making it easier to connect with friends.

But it’s no secret that Facebook’s real motive, and for many months its overriding concern, is keeping up with Twitter. Although Facebook has 200 million users to Twitter’s 25 million (that doesn’t include all the new registrations that undoubtedly resulted in June following the Iranian elections), the consensus is that the future of social networking lies in microblogging: short up-to-the-second messages broadcast to your friends and followers. The key part of this equation—and what equipped Twitter to be such a powerful means of spreading information in the fallout of the Iranian elections—is that “tweets” are both searchable and occur in real time. Real time searches are impeded by the sorts of filters on Facebook that allow you to choose who can and cannot view photos tagged of you or whether your relationship status has changed. These filters allow you to micromanage who gets to see what, and are what make people comfortable being Facebook friends with their bosses as well as their frat brothers.

Facebook has a history of adding features that face large initial resistance, but come to be regarded by users as indispensable. College students were uneasy about professional networks—and adults—gaining access to Facebook after its early users began graduating from college, and were mildly indignant when the network was opened up to high school students. But users have long since come to terms with Facebook’s openness. The introduction of the news feed—the stream of information that updates you on recent changes and additions to your friends’ profiles—provoked a massive backlash from college students because, at first, it felt like an invasion of privacy. Yet, before long, we recognized that the news feed made it possible to stay appraised of all the weird and interesting things the kids you never thought you would hear from again after high school were up to. Even the latest redesign of the home page and profiles was initially unpopular, but whatever opposition may have existed soon subsided. The lesson to draw from these changes is that, as a general proposition, Facebook can make fairly significant changes modifying how users interact with the site .

The most important exception to this dynamic occurred when Facebook rewrote its terms of service in February, effectively laying claim to all the information users publish to their profiles on the premise that, “We publish it, ergo we can do what we want with it.” Users rebelled and Facebook backtracked, reinstituting its abandoned terms of service in which control over content resided with users.

So, back to the question: How will users respond to the new privacy rules? Will they grow comfortable with sharing photos and posts with the whole of the World Wide Web? Or will Facebook become a two-tiered site, with one set of information available only to your friends and a Twitter-like feature, visible to everybody, tacked on?

The proposed privacy rules will bring to the fore the abiding online tensions between the need for privacy and the mania for rapid dissemination of information. And how Facebook and its users choose to resolve these issues today will have important implications for a generation whose every move has been catalogued on a social networking site since middle school graduation.


Clay A. Dumas ’10, a former Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House.