Response: Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck (Boyd)
Friday, October 2, 2009 by Dominey Flores
Personally, I found Boyd’s article quite relevant to my own experience with Facebook. She talks about how the ‘News Feeds’ feature that was introduced to the site completely altered its ‘social dynamic’ (for 700,000 Facebook users at least). One of the main points she makes was how this new feature ‘exposed’ information that, although accessible, was once ‘obscure’; but once made highly visible, may potentially trigger various (possibly negative) responses/interpretations from a user’s network of friends. I agree with Boyd that this may cause complications for many people who do not wish for their ‘every move’ to be broadcast. For instance, I had a friend, who accepted the friend invite of another friend’s ex-husband. This caused a great deal of strain on their friendship in the ‘physical world’ (i.e. “Omigod, how could you accept that son of a b*tch’s friend invite! You’ve totally betrayed me!”). The point is, the fact that she had even accepted the ex’s friend invite would never have come to the fore if it hadn’t been for the News Feed (obviously my friend wasn’t aware of the ‘privacy settings’ that Facebook had introduced). This particular case illustrates Boyd’s next point – that the introduction of such features may force some people to seriously censor their every move for fear of misinterpretation; and omit information that they normally wouldn’t try to hide under normal circumstances. She also examines how the social convergence that takes place on sites like Facebook may lead to a further loss of control and privacy for some people. I suppose if you are conscious of the different ways in which you present yourself to and address different people (i.e. work colleagues versus close friends) then social convergence may be problematic. It becomes a lot harder to maintain a particular trope of oneself on sites like Facebook, when the various elements of one’s personality become more ‘exposed’ and accessible...