Andy Van Zeeland Phil 308 10 Dec 2010

Everyone Knows – The Dangers of Social Networking Websites

As of March 22, 2010, over one-third of all Americans have a Facebook profile and visit at least monthly (Hepburn). More than three billion photos are uploaded to the website each month, and more than 60 million status updates are posted each day (Hepburn). Facebook has pervaded the life of global culture in a way never seen before. This is a problem because Facebook is very apathetic about their users' privacy. Facebook has a history of changing privacy settings without actively alerting the user base, and even preventing users from hiding certain information from the world. This paper will provide a quick introduction to social networking and how it has evolved over the years, the rise of

Facebook, and how Facebook has been continually exploiting the privacy of its users.

When someone thinks about social networking, the ideas come to mind of posting a message on a group wall, inviting that old high school friend to join your friend list, and sharing that beautiful nature picture with all of your friends. But it hasn’t always been what we consider it today. Wikipedia defines a social networking service as “an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people […] who share interests and/or activities” (“Social Network Service”). Social networking has been redefining itself ever since the term was coined. To be able to truly understand where it is headed, we have to first examine its past.

The idea of 'social networking’ started with the BBS – short for Bulletin Board System

(Nickson). BBSs were the precursor to the Internet and functioned similarly to the cork-and-pin bulletin boards often found in entrances to public places, where people can post information (“Bulletin

Board System”). People would connect and log on to the system using a terminal program, and once logged on, the user would be presented with an array of actions that could be performed, such as

1 uploading and downloading programs, writing and reading messages to and from other users, and reading public message boards (“Bulletin Board System”). BBSs provided users with a rudimentary means to communicate with each other over phone lines before the Internet existed. They were quickly phased out with the rise of the World Wide Web, which brought about a lot of change in how social networking sites would operate. Finally, there were websites dedicated to the idea of social networking.

One of the first of such websites was SixDegrees.com. It was revolutionary in the way that it allowed its users to create profiles, invite friends, organize groups, and surf other user profiles

(Nickson). All of this was great, and with 3.5 million registered users at its peak, it seemed that

SixDegrees would continue to grow and expand on the idea of a social networking website (Prall).

Unfortunately though, SixDegrees did not last very long, and it certainly didn't leverage the popularity or support that a site such as Facebook has today (Prall). The biggest reason for its demise was the fact that the online advertising industry, which is Facebook's main source of income, wasn't as strong and mature as it is today (Prall, Parr). The fact that the economy was also entering a recession around the time the company peaked didn't help the low revenue numbers it was receiving from online advertising

(Prall).

So with SixDegrees crumbling shortly after the turn of the millennium, the online world found itself searching for the next answer to its new social networking need. In the year 2002, the answer appeared: Friendster (“Friendster”). Friendster took the ideas presented by SixDegrees, reapplied them in a newer technological age, and was able to flourish. Friendster grew and grew, and after a mere six months it had already hit three million registered members (Simon). However, its quick growth unfortunately led to its downfall. As its CEO was focused on further expansion and growth into the future, the website's servers were struggling to handle the increasing traffic. Users, bogged down with long load times, ended up searching for an alternative, and thus Myspace entered the scene.

Myspace was created several months before Friendster started having problems. A few of its

2 members saw the great potential in this newly untapped market and began taking bits and pieces of its ideas to start their own version. They were employees of a company called eUniverse, which provided them with all the startup technical infrastructure required, greatly simplifying their entrance into the social networking business (Stone). This meant that the Myspace team was able to focus almost completely on business strategies, which allowed them to really thrive.

One of the great differences between Myspace and other modern social networking sites is that

Myspace allows a very high level of user page customization. For example, Myspace users can embed custom cascading style sheet (CSS) code into their user page. CSS is a way for the user to quickly and easily apply design changes to the website, such as adding background images, changing fonts and colors, or adding borders around certain parts of the page. Users can also embed a media player into their page that will play music or video when a user navigates to it. This is one of the reasons for

Myspace’s appeal to the younger generation, who tend to be less interested in usability and more interested in creative expression. Unfortunately for Myspace, there was a bigger fish growing and competing with them after their debut in 2003: Facebook.

Facebook was created in a Harvard dormitory in 2003. It has been widely successful because it expanded on a lot of the ideas from other social networking sites. Users can do all of the standard actions such as create profiles with photos, make lists of personal interests, and provide contact information and other basic personal information. What makes Facebook so successful now is the fact that it continues to stay ahead of the competition by adding brand new functionality, continually innovating and giving users more reasons to regularly log on.

Facebook was revolutionary compared to other social networking sites, and it was able to edge out Myspace for several reasons. Facebook pages were designed with a much cleaner interface.

Without all the user-added bells and whistles that Myspace boasted, Facebook was able to keep a much cleaner and more uniform layout and design. Because of this uniformity, users were able to find

3 information much faster than when forced to dig through a cluttered Myspace page. Another reason is that there was less advertising on Facebook. Also, Facebook encouraged you to register with a real name instead of with a username. This made finding and connecting with other users easier, as you could search by their full name instead of having to know their username. Moreover, Facebook was coming up with new innovations at a faster rate than Myspace, such as the creation of the wall and user groups, both of which were extremely popular. All of these reasons pushed Facebook to the lead, but probably the most important was the fact that Facebook was exclusive. It originally started as a website for Harvard students to network with other Harvard students and required a Harvard email address to register.

Seeing the great potential in growing the user base, but being very careful not to alienate their original users, Facebook opened its doors to Stanford University as well as other universities in the Ivy

League besides Harvard. After expanding to these schools, Facebook began offering membership to students at thousands of additional universities. Shortly thereafter, they opened membership to any person affiliated with a high school or high-profile company, and eventually welcomed anyone over the age of 13 years old. While they might have drifted away from their original user base, it was clearly worth it. Facebook has grown to be the supergiant of social networking sites, boasting an active user base of over 500 million people. To put that into perspective, that's around 32% of the active internet user population and there is no sign of slowing down. You might be thinking, so what? What's the big problem with Facebook becoming the de-facto standard for social networking needs? Well, his name is

Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg, or “Zuck,” is the CEO and co-founder of Facebook. As such, he is able to lead the company in any direction he sees fit. In Vanity Fair’s 2010 list of “most influential people of the Information Age” Zuck is listed as number one. Thus, his past and beliefs deserve to be examined to determine if he’s someone we can trust with our personal information.

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Zuck grew up in the outskirts of New York City and is the son of a psychiatrist and a dentist. He started programming at a young age and began learning software development even before attending high school. There he wrote a program called the Synapse Media Player that used rudimentary artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits. It was a widespread success. After being offered employment at such companies as Microsoft and AOL and receiving purchase offers, he released the software for free, turned down the job offers, and went off to Harvard to study psychology and computer science.

As a sophomore at Harvard, his hacker persona really began to shine. In October of 2003, he wrote what some call the predecessor to Facebook: Facemash. Facemash was similar to the website

“Hot or Not,” where females' pictures were paired up against each other and voted on to determine the

“hotter” user. Facemash was, however, strictly for Harvard students. In order to obtain all of the pictures required for the website, Zuck hacked into nine of the houses at Harvard and downloaded entire photo directories illegitimately (“Facebook”). After he compiled the photos and hosted the website, the site became an instant success. Within its first four hours online, it attracted 450 unique visitors and 22,000 photo-views (“Facebook”). Only a few days after it was online, the Harvard administration found out about the website. They shut it down and charged Zuck with breaching security and violating copyrights and individual privacy. Luckily for him, he wasn't expelled and was just put on academic probation for his blatant disregard of authority and others’ privacy. This was not the first time Zuck violated privacy laws or guidelines and definitely not the last.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with his actions, some of his views are unconventional.

He has even been quoted as saying “It's OK to break things” in order, as he later added, “to make them better” (McGirt, Levy). This is because Zuck is a believer in what is called the Hacker Ethic. The

Hacker Ethic is a core set of values focused on sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to computers, and world improvement. Among these values is one very bold principle: all information

5 should be free (“Hacker Ethic”). This principle goes against what many people consider to be one of the basic human rights: privacy.

Along the same lines of his Hacker Ethic beliefs, Zuck has been quoted as having a “grand vision for an open society.” Because of this, he has continually disregarded privacy concerns, and users have strenuously objected. So Zuck has been toning back his visions for an open society and has given

Facebook users at least some control over privacy. But as we'll see, this control has been continually changing since Facebook opened its doors to the world in 2004.

In particular, Facebook has repeatedly changed its default privacy settings over the past six years, slowly relaxing them, as shown in the figures below. However, starting in late 2009, the slow relaxations became abrupt changes without Facebook actively informing its user base, which means users are forced to learn about these changes on their own.

Figure 1: A display of Facebook’s default settings over time. The circle is sliced into parts of a Facebook page, and

inner circles depict which part of the population can see which part of the page. Parts that are shaded in imply that

they are visible to that portion of the population by default (O’Neill).

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The biggest problem with this trend is that 25 percent of households with a Facebook account don’t use the site’s privacy controls or aren’t aware of them (Widerlund). Advertising companies take advantage of the availability of so much information because so many people are ignorant of these default settings. Either people are unaware that changes are being made to their privacy settings, or they don't realize that it would be beneficial to change them.

Another contributing factor is the growing complexity of Facebook’s privacy policy, the original draft of which was a mere 1004 words long. Within six years’ time, it has grown to be 5,830 words. This makes it longer than the U.S. Constitution, which is only 4,543 words (“Facebook's

'outrageous' privacy policy”). The added length discourages people from reading it, which further reduces their understanding of the policy.

This has been a recurring problem for Facebook. In the past, changing privacy settings was overly complex, for example, during the summer of 2009. At that time, 50 settings changes were

7 required to prevent Facebook from sharing private information with third parties, and there were more than 170 different options for controlling the visibility of your information (“Facebook's 'outrageous' privacy policy”). Simply put, the interface was far too complicated for the average user. This encouraged users to not bother attempting to control their privacy settings because it was too difficult to make sure they were putting their profiles on the levels they wanted. This issue was eventually addressed with the new round of settings released late in 2009, which changed Facebook’s privacy controls to allow high levels of control of specific settings while being relatively straightforward and easy to use.

What’s worse is that Facebook removed some of the privacy of even its informed users. Along with the overhaul released in December 2009, Facebook made some profile information publicly available with no real way to protect it, including the profile picture, gender, geographic region, networks the user belonged to, and their friends list (Paul). Privacy watchdogs heavily criticized this move, and Facebook backed off on the part that forced the users’ friends list to be publicly available

(Paul). While most users tend to keep this information open to the public to help others find them, there was no need for Facebook to revoke the extra security for the paranoid user.

The complex privacy controls weren't the only problem. In 2007 Facebook released a supplement to their advertising system called Beacon, which sent data to websites external to Facebook and thus allowed for targeted advertisements. It also allowed people to share their activities on other websites directly on their user page. Beacon was originally released as an opt-out system. Among other critics, the civic action group MoveOn.org blasted Facebook for causing users to share by default and without being told information that they might consider private. Due to the huge public outcry, within one month of Beacon's release, it was changed to an opt-in system. Facebook's vice president of marketing and operations, Chamath Palihapitiya, was asked in a New York Times article, if a user were to perform an activity on a website and declined to publish the activity to friends on Facebook, would

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Facebook still receive information about the purchase? Palihapitiya said “Absolutely not. One of the things we are still trying to do is dispel a lot of misinformation that is being propagated unnecessarily”

(Stone). Unfortunately, this statement was incorrect. A security researcher for Computer Associates tested it a few weeks later and found that all of the data was being sent to Facebook despite the user’s opting out of Beacon and not even being logged onto Facebook at the time (Perez). This ended up as a huge scandal, with Facebook being sued and having to pay a total of 9.5 million dollars to several users.

Another problem is the extreme difficulty it takes to actually remove an account from

Facebook. A user must click through a set of options to “delete” it. But it doesn’t actually do that; it simply suspends the account until the user decides they might want to join up again. The only way to completely remove all of the information stored by Facebook is to manually delete all of the content on a profile. This includes removing every friend, leaving any group that they either started or joined, leaving all networks, deleting all the photos they uploaded and any photo albums, deleting every message from their wall, deleting every comment they ever wrote on anyone else’s page, deleting all their messages and notifications, erasing all the information saved in their profile, removing any applications they added to their page, and then finally deactivating the account (“Delete your Facebook

Account History”). This ten-step list is absurd, and there is no reason why a user shouldn’t be able to simply delete everything Facebook has stored with a click of a button. What’s even worse is that after going through this process and “deactivating the account,” it isn’t immediately deleted. Instead it is placed on hold for two weeks, and if the user tries to log in, the deactivation process is cancelled without warning or notification. This extremely difficult and confusing process has led to some very upset users even still today.

On the other hand, despite Facebook continually making mistakes, most of the time it didn't ignore its community. Every time a situation has arisen where there has been a large public outcry over

9 one of Facebook's actions or policies, it did eventually listen to the community and revise the questionable acts. But it will continue to make mistakes because it's still in their best interests to “ride the line” between respecting and exploiting users. With a more open Facebook, advertisers can target their ads more effectively since they know what the user is interested in. With better targeted ads comes more revenue, because the users are more likely to click on an ad that is targeted to their interests.

Therefore, Facebook will continue to try to exploit its users’ privacy until there is a large enough public outcry to force it to rescind their actions. The problem with this reactive approach is that it fails to satisfy these privacy concerns. Moreover, many users have no idea that Facebook is exploiting their lack of concern for privacy settings, so it will take a lot of complaining from those who are informed to bring about changes.

Many other people are concerned about this situation. On May 31, 2010 members of the website

QuitFacebookDay.com decided to do exactly that: quit Facebook. A total of 38,000 people joined this site in its demonstration, citing two main issues: not giving the users fair choices and not having good intentions (Milan). While this is hardly a dent in the Facebook user population, the fact that the site was widely publicized across the Internet shows that it left a mark on the community.

Even more interesting are the new social media sites that keep popping up. Probably the most hyped is Diaspora, which started development in June, 2010 after successfully raising over $200,000 in a few days. In its own words, it is “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network” which plans on allowing users to host their own “seeds,” which are essentially equivalent to a user page (“Kickstarter Pitch”). All information about you, including photos you decide to share and anything written on your page, will be controlled with 100% transparency by you. Leaving these choices to users shows that they want to have more control over how their begin information is accessed, stored and shared. The site is currently in an alpha-release (that is, it is experimental), it has opened its source code to the community as of September 2010, and will begin beta-testing in the near

10 future. While Diaspora might not replace Facebook, its mere existence shows that at least a small portion of the community thinks Facebook could do a better job protecting its users’ privacy.

All of the evidence points to the same conclusion: Facebook’s claims about privacy are flawed:

It has continually changed the default settings without actively alerting its user base. Its privacy policy still is long and complex even after it stopped the questionable practices of the past, like the exploitations of Beacon and the default settings of the summer of 2009. It has even removed the ability to hide certain fields from public view. All of this is combined with the difficulty of deleting your profile. At the end of the day, Facebook can say whatever it wants, but actions speak louder than words, and Facebook’s actions show that it just doesn’t care enough about privacy.

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