On Facebook, Only the Rich Have Privacy

December 21st, 2009 admin Posted in Operating Systems | No Comments »

[From multicast » Blog Archive » On Facebook, Only the Rich Have Privacy]

My co-author, Christian Sandvig, blogs on the changes in the privacy settings for Facebook. Here are his conclusions:

Facebook gets to have the appearance of consultation (after all, you “agreed” by clicking through the above screen) even though the result overall is the reduction of privacy. As is clear in the table of this dotrights.org analysis of the Facebook privacy transition, the Facebook move is all about changing the defaults. They presumably did so because more data accessibility means more visibility and value for their service.

The larger point is that facilitating “choice” is bankrupt as a societal strategy for managing difficult problems (like privacy) related to new technologies. More than anything, it’s a strategy to circumvent difficult public deliberation (in this case, about privacy) that we as a polity ought to have. Even in the case of decisions with real consequences, if individual choice is used, as we put it: “the authority of software trumps that of advice” (p. 43)… Facebook’s pre-selected default options are going to be the societal policy in this area. And that means that effective regulation requires the scrutiny of defaults. Pushing individual choice offers us false freedom and this is not good enough.