Is privacy Selfish?

A joint blog with the FroggPrincess

Preface
Nearly four months ago, I signed off Facebook, saying I'd be gone for a month to work on my NaNoWriMo project. Back then it was late October, and I had some doubt that I'd finish 50,000 words in 30 days with the constant nag of Facebook zipping through the back of my brain. So I did what I always do when I need to buckle down and get work done: I cut out distractions. A month later, I proudly held (well maybe not since I never printed it) 50,899 odd words without a single Facebook login. By then the urge to grind away at Mafia Wars, Mafia II, and Farkle were distant stains in my mind; silly obsessions, that clearly needed no attention further. I logged in, updated my profile gloating my NaNoWriMo Win and logged off.

By December 3rd or so, I'd deleted my account. Well. Not really. Deleting a Facebook account, truly deleting it as in wiped hard drive deleting is damn nigh impossible. Instead, I painstakingly spent a couple hours, physically removing "allow" access to every stupid App I ever tried. Then I removed all of my pictures before going through and setting every single privacy setting to "Me Only" before firing off the "I want to quit Facebook email." I've since done the same to my Twitter and FriendFeed accounts.

Why? I like my privacy

Bullshit
Google my name: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Drew+Lackovic&aq=f&aqi=&oq=
It's not sparse. Most folks won't look more than three pages deep on a search return. You have to slug through eight pages of links before the search results start to thin out and display stuff that's not connected to me. In addition to having three stories online, five years worth of blog entries, several personal websites, old artwork, and dozens of forum posts in places like LinuxQuestions and UtterAccess, not to mention my CV, and all my address info (thanks to superpages.com), there really isn't much of me left to hide. So why disband from Facebook and social networking?

Well, It's complicated.
To start, I hadn't been on Facebook all that long. I can't remember exactly when, but I don't think it was any later than June of '09. I joined partially out of peer pressure (ala everyone else is doing it), and partially because I wanted to see if I could figure out why the hell it was such a popular phenomenon.

Why isn't Facebook's popularity obvious to me?

For all the time I spend on a computer (and believe me it's a lot of time), I really have never been able to see the interestingness in using the Internet to meet other people or to communicate beyond Email and IM.

As a proof of concept of this, back in college I played a lot of Diablo II. Usually though I played local network games with friends. We didn't chat while we played; we just smashed stuff and giggled at the secret cow demon level. On the odd chance that I did log into Battlenet, I was generally shocked at the poor typing and immature content of other players. This was still in the age before texting got big, but "UR" and "THX" were already starting to float about among others. So largely I ignored online gaming until one game appealed to my inner D&D Nerd, Ragnarok Online. Back then it was in Alpha...maybe early Beta. They talked it up as being a RP intensive game. At the time, my girlfriend had sneakily gotten me to quit playing real D&D, so my craving, so I thought, could be sated by this game.

I played from just before Christmas break till Valentine's day. I tried to roleplay. And not once in that time did I meet a single person worth talking to beyond the five minutes of interaction. Granted, I did silly things like selling flowers (a useless and worthless item) outside a boss' lair mainly to start conversations. Largely I got bitched out for not having any potions for sale and/or for actually being there and trying to start conversations (usually merchants would set up shop and walk away leaving the game running while they racked up the cash). And so, I left the realm of online video games for the relative comfort of console games and good ole Pen and Paper D&D.

Furthermore, once I joined Facebook, like everyone, I slowly amassed a group of "friends" that extended beyond my real-world friends I actually see and talk to on a regular basis. Granted, I can easily say that everyone on my friend list was someone I knew, and with my privacy settings the way they were, strangers wouldn't have been able to find and friend me even if they wanted to. And despite the fact that I friended several friends from highschool, some of which that still live in the area, not once did I really have any sort of interaction with any of them outside of the occasional assist in Mafia Wars.

So, Reason one for quitting Facebook: I don't find the net to be very sociable. Or I don't go to the net to socialize.

That whole cellphone thing
I don't use them. Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are moving to rely heavily on mobile principle--Twitter's ubiquitous "what are you doing now?" is proof of this. Folks with fancy internet cellphones can Tweet and Facebook away no matter where they are. It's a great way too to get around corporate firewalls if you can't Facebook on the ole work computer. But I abhor phones (Imagine that, a former 411 operator hates phones...there's a shocking twist, right?). And furthermore, I think the notion of being contactable at any time and location is obscene. I'm not that important (unless my wife's having a baby, you better not call me when I'm not at home).

This leads to reason two: If I don't like to be contacted by anyone, why would I want EVERYONE (as the new Facebook controls make your stuff go that broad) to know my momentary business? The advantage of having a blog is knowing that the whole thing is public, knowing that I have to filter what I say to a certain degree, because, despite the protection of the 1st Amendment, I could potentially still get nailed and/or fired if I were to slander an employer too badly, or say or do something on this blog that generally makes me look like such a giant dickhead asshole that no one would want to consider hiring me in the future.

Facebook, when I joined, let me set the visibility scope of my activities. And though leery and mistrustful, I accepted this as being good enough for government work, cranked up the privacy to "Friends Only," and despite some groaning from my more social friends, I felt fairly content in the broadcast footprint of my identity. Last December's privacy changes destroyed that happy little world, and would make increasingly larger amounts of my data public. Mafia Wars status updates to my friends are annoying enough (and I did feel bad for those flying around as much as they did), but the thought of all that kind of garbage flowing freely out to the internet for anyone to see, and/or for acquaintances or former students not on my friends list wasn't really acceptable in my head.

I think it's well accepted that we exist in a compartmentalized state. I am a different self at work at FMC than I am standing before students at Behrend, than I am at home playing the Mammas and the Babies with Molly than I am sitting here inside my head clattering some keys at 11:52 PM on a Monday Tuesday (strangely I'm revising this exactly 24 hours after I wrote it; what a co-inky-dink). night. Frontline has run a couple documentaries, "Growing Up Online" and more recently, "Digital Nation," in which this notion of multiple-selves is one that is covered. I remember one teenager in "Growing up Online" saying something along the lines of "There are two versions of me. The one you see here in the world, and the real me, the me that's on the Internet." Sadly, this girl's "real me" was a self obsessed with anorexia (which fortunately was being treated by the epilogue of the documentary). But to her, interestingly, the abstraction of the net, the separation of mind from body freed her to become what she felt was her ideal self. What startles me watching these documentaries, is the reckless willingness of the kids depicted to say/do/think whatever they want over the internet without second thought for potential repercussions. "Growing Up Online," for example discusses an incident where a number of high school students took the train into NYC for a concert at Madison Square Garden. The students YouTubed a number of videos of themselves partying and drinking on the train and at the concert. And when the school administration found out (thanks to one of the kids' PTO parent moms), they were all shocked and outraged that their drunken party pictures were getting them into trouble. There's no doubt that this kind of teenage drunken partying would have happened without the Internet; it has happened, arguably for every generation. My parents spent their teens careening drunk across the state line into New York where the drinking age was still 18 so they could get shitfaced at bars so ramshackle that the bathrooms were nothing more than holes in the ground. People died on these weekend binge rampage. Heading up to Clymer, NY as a kid, my mom showed me "Dead Man's Curve" many times; and she knew the men that died there--too drunk, too fast. But such is the role of late adolescence, to do stupid, possibly dangerous and regrettable things, but the fact that these things are caught on camera phone and willfully uploaded to the net for public consumption seems reckless beyond the point of common sense.

But then again, we live in an age where it actually as to be said, "Hey girls, don't take nudie pics of yourself and email it to your boyfriend, because he'll share it with the whole school."

There's no doubt in my mind that the Internet reduces inhibitions. The faux anonymity of it's existence, allows us to swing up a hefty set of brass ones and pull off a lot of shit we would never do or say in person. Sites like Facebook thrive upon this notion. Zuckerberg's recent statement about how folks want to share more shows that he's interested in cultivating an environment where barriers between this sharing are continually broken down, paving the way for an ever wider superhighway of personal data flowing in all directions. And the barriers? Privacy. Privacy makes for poor business because the private self doesn't want advertisements even if they are catered to private interests. The Private self also won't share as much information to as many people, and in a world where click-throughs equate to dollar signs, again less clicks is less money.

Another danger rises from the miasma of wide-open user information channels: data mining. While this is still in its infancy, the potential danger of social media data mining is immense. PleaseRobMe.com is a perfect example. From their "Why" Page:

The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not... home. So here we are; on one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home. It gets even worse if you have "friends" who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That's right, slap them across the face.

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information.

And while this site is trying to raise awareness about the dangers of allowing geo-locating to Tweet everyone in the world your location, you can be sure some less than reputable sites are doing much much worse.

Or is it an Age thing?
Zuckerberg and Facebook cater to the new hipsters. Earlier I mentioned Facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg talking about his feelings towards privacy. He went on, saying

In the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that's evolved over time. (Thompson)

And if you look at the curve, I'm sure the social norm is moving in that direction. Living outside of that norm is alienating though. It reminds me a bit of a Fraternity; you're not cool 'till you're one of us. Come join, but there's a price. In Facebook's case, it's your privacy, and the deluge of ads, and shady marketing virals. But once you're in, you're one of the club; you're ok. And if Facebook isn't your Pi Rho, perhaps try another on Frat Row: MySpace, LinkedIn, etc (Like I need to list social networks here). A frat for every type of person. And one day we can all share our drunken sex pics, and our future employers won't care because they're sharing their office bong party pics from last summer, and the Prez is posting YouTube feeds from the Oval office in his pink hart boxers and mustard-stained undershirt with a big Cuban Cigar hanging out of his mouth. Sure there's no doubt that this juggernaut is going to continue RickRolling over all of the world to a point that eventually governments start considering social networking as a potential tap in for legal identification.

I'm old enough to remember computers when the screens were monochrome green, and I was giggling at text based adventure games when they said, "I can't do that!!!" after I typed "Fuck you" into the prompt with all of my ten year old smugness. Maybe because I never owned a computer before 1998, I have some sense of anti-technology curmudgeon in me; a sense that doing things in-person, while at times far more onerous, is the best way for communication. Why? Because I am forced to represent myself physically with all of my conscious and unconscious body language to another person or group under similar conditions. I have a larger vocabulary in person--sarcasm and other subtlties, for example, work as expected (whereas over the net, they're always hit or miss, and rarely interpreted correctly). And if I am to communicate online (which I do quite often), email or direct IM are my weapons of choice. Posting on friends' walls seems silly for me. Why should I care about my Friend A's Friend X (whom I'm not friends with) posting something inane on Friend A's Wall? It's silly to me to broadcast information for one person to everyone.


But I blog and I write
So what should I do with all the other stuff that flits around on the internet with my name attached? I have no intention of taking that down. Perhaps it's more of a control thing. Going back to the idea of compartmentalized self; I know what goes up here on the blog, and on the websites. I control the stories I submit to online pubs, and those that (eventually) will appear under my own publication. It boils back to the notion of the gatekeeper of my information. I like it to rest in my hands, for it to post or fade at my whim, not some abstracted corporation's decision on "what's best for me, or the current social trends." And thinking along those lines, does not the data I control become then more authentic me? By disseminating information under my name knowingly to the world at large, it then represents myself. A company disseminating information on my behalf also becomes a representation of myself, but a representation that I may or may not have intended to exist publicly, thus becoming a taintedself or nonself.

So does that make me selfish to want to try to control the depiction of me to the world of strangers out there [not] looking in my direction? Hmm. But then again, rarely, if ever, is anyone happy about invasions of privacy in other sectors: TSA, for instance now rifles through your luggage regardless, and in some areas have been pushing for full body scans as mandatory. Thanks to the PATRIOT act, lots and lots of people had their calls wiretapped after 9/11. I think just about everyone today has had their social security number stolen at least once thanks to a lost/stolen laptop from [insert just about any company in the world here]. Our names and addresses (both snail and email) get sold to advertisers, who send us gobs of garbage. I could go on, but all of these things are things that generally no one likes. Sure you can make claims that they're protecting our nation and whatnot, but in the long run, we as Americans, in our core, like privacy. So when Zuckerberg starts saying that all this privacy thing is going to the wayside, I'm leery. Especially when we all know that he makes money when more of your information goes public.

So long story sh_rt, I may have a lot of crap out on the internet, but it's my crap. Since I don't monetize this blog, or pay for promotion, my visibility is low as well as my readership, but isn't a smaller more dedicated body of readers better than a swarm of nodding assentors that just jumped over because everyone else was doing the same? I like the internet, especially today's internet for giving me the ability to self-publish cheaply, but I want to do so on my terms. Facebook doesn't care about me; it cares about the money I can generate by spewing me all over the net. I'll find a way to gain my own notoriety thank you very much.