CHICAGO — If you visit a website, without logging into your Facebook account, and are welcomed by a Facebook-themed message citing your name and showing your profile picture, would you be excited or uncomfortable?
In late April, at the annual Facebook developer conference in San Francisco, chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg announced a pilot program with Yelp, Microsoft Docs and Pandora to “personalize” user experiences using information from Facebook profiles. All users are automatically opted-in to this setting. The company also launched social plug-ins for all websites where users can log in using their Facebook usernames to see friends’ activity on that given website.
In response, some top Google engineers deactivated their accounts and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) requested the Federal Trade Commission to review the policies and mandate privacy protections. Although several of the site’s members have complained in online forums, a majority of users remain unaware until they log on to a partner site. Facebook did not respond to requests to discuss these new tools.
“It’s clear that Facebook has proven its willingness to change its privacy policy but it isn’t always as clear about what that means,” said Rebecca Jeschke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocate for enhanced online privacy.
Making Facebook ubiquitous with the Web has long been cited as the ultimate goal by the organization’s top executives, but the challenge is balancing this desire with privacy protections. Its critical mass of users prevents people from deactivating accounts, mitigating the threat of a mass exodus, and perhaps tipping the scale towards less privacy.
“Facebook knows that there is a lot they can do before people are willing to walk away,” said Chris Hoofnagle, lecturer in residence at UC Berkeley School of Law.
In the 1990s the Clinton government decided to let marketplace competition drive the development of online privacy policies, assuming the best practice would rise to the top. This policy also assumed consumers would educate themselves on each website’s privacy policy before deciding whether to stay or provide personal information.
Instead, consumers never paid attention – perhaps they assumed the government had mandated protections – leading to an absence of competition, and in some cases, a complete aversion to the notion itself.
“We’ve seen in recent years an insistence, mainly among technology companies, that young people don’t care about [privacy] anymore,” said Hoofnagle.
But a study released mid-April, co-authored by Hoofnagle, refutes these claims, showing that youth – regardless of their activity on social networking sites – value privacy as much as their elders. And, interestingly, these youth behave online under an assumption of more privacy than actually exists.
In the survey, conducted jointly by UC Berkeley School of Law and the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania, individuals were asked to rate nine statements as true or false. The statements were all true, and referenced the right of firms to sell and use consumer data without asking for explicit permission. This came as a surprise to most youth surveyed, as 88 percent answered two or less correctly.
Protection of privacy has historically been associated with government and issues of surveillance, but private sector companies now hold so much personal data and raises questions about how much private information is available to other people and to advertisers.
“You don’t necessarily know what kind of sophisticated assessments people can make with the information you put out there,” said Jeschke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, citing a popular study where MIT researchers identified an individual’s sexual orientation by piecing together disparate pieces of online data. According to Jeschke people need to complete a “gut check” on new tools and policies to ensure they are comfortable with how much personal information enters the public sphere.
The policy options going forward on advertising are unclear, Hoofnagle said. The key issue of contention will be the advertising industry’s desire to collect all information on consumer behavior online – which sites are visited, in what order, for how long and which content is accessed – and giving consumers the right to not be tracked at all.
Today, consumers can opt-out of tailored advertising through networks like the Network Advertising Initiative, but that does not mean you are no longer being tracked. It only means that you will not be subjected to the advertisements.
“They want to be able to collect everything as a principle,” Hoofnagle said. “The [personal privacy] control mantra is a bit loaded. What if control means I don’t want to be tracked at all? I think they would say no.”
