the Sam Jackson College Experience

If you have not yet, please go read the article. Done? Good! I think the article can be summed up well by this line:

"The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud."

All very true.  It's great that Holson was interested in covering this angle which is so weirdly contrarian - that young people should care about privacy! Please note, however, that the conventional wisdom is not just 'recently' wrong - it always has been. (Separate discussion). My opinions were collapsed in the context of the article into that framework, but I think they merit some further elaboration. Personally, I never wanted to 'live out loud.' I am cognizant of the fact that technology is making our lives broadcast more and more, and that more and more information about us is available online. As a result, I want to strictly control my online persona. I want to be able to share information with my friends, and in some cases with weaker ties or even strangers. But I don't want to broadcast every detail of my life, not now, not ever.

I'm always the cranky person complaining about Facebook and various other privacy encroachments, not to mention the serious civil liberties violations that have taken place in such alarming number over the last decade. But, these are not new thoughts. In fact, thanks to my interactions online, I have explicit documentation... (a blessing and a curse). Consider my statements late 2007 (so, Senior fall, HS) in response to a danah boyd - Robert Scoble discussion about Facebook:

"Facebook as a tool loses much of its usefulness to many of its users if it’s made too public. Many of them don’t know that yet, though. There will be a period of disconnect there, I think."

I think in many respects that disconnect continues because Facebook has been so good at deceiving its users. When Facebook claims that it is simply responding to new privacy 'norms and mores' alone, it cannot be taken at all seriously. Whether such a statement is true or not is subject to some debate, but what is certain is that the more access Facebook has to our personal information, and the more it can be shared, the greater their profit potential through advertising and other uses of personal information.

Every time Facebook redesigns its site, it resets privacy defaults to the most public possible settings, and makes it very hard for the uninformed users to realize what is going on, much less how to change things and assert their old privacy standards onto new opportunities for exposure. Even for those who know exactly what Facebook is up to, and want to stop them, it can be hard to defend oneself!

There are some, citing here again Robert Scoble, who are jumping on the 'expose everything' bandwagon. That is fine for them, they should be given the tools to do so if they like, but I should not be dragged into that affair. I feel bad highlighting Scoble's example because it is just this kind of situation that leads him to over-share; commentary as an opportunity for self-promotion. He likes sharing because, as he is situated, it brings him attention and influence. (Then again, what am I doing here?).

That aside, My ordinary interactions with friends are not something that I want indexed for eternity and accessible to all. Unfortunately, one must often act as if that were the case, simply because companies like Facebook cannot be trusted, and even if they could, your weakest link is always the other people who have access - you'll never have total lockdown. That doesn't mean it hurts to try.

-  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -

Let's turn back to the New York Times piece.

Sam Jackson, a junior at Yale who started a blog when he was 15 and who has been an intern at Google, said he had learned not to trust any social network to keep his information private. “If I go back and look, there are things four years ago I would not say today,” he said. “I am much more self-censoring. I’ll try to be honest and forthright, but I am conscious now who I am talking to.” He has learned to live out loud mostly by trial and error and has come up with his own theory: concentric layers of sharing.

Layer 2 (reasonable expectations of privacy):

Facebook, though less and less so over time. For the best graphic on the ways Facebook has continually made inroads in selling out its users for profit, please see this excellent chart / graph / animation. As you can see, over time Facebook has tried to make you share more and more of your private information. However, even so, Facebook isfunctionally a more private medium than the next layers. I try to work through the privacy trainwreck as best I can and use Facebook therefore to share more semi-private information. My Facebook is clean not just because my life is (truly!) but also because I know that it really can't be trusted. However, I'll still post on a friend's Facebook wall a comment complaining about a mutual teacher, or similar complaint.

This is because even if Facebook has security problems, it is not directly indexable (or at least, I try to make it as little as possible). This may one day change, and I will end up being embarassed by the kinds of remarks that can be taken in aggregate or out of context as potentially problematic. For a very long time I tried not to upload many photos to Facebook because of three reasons: a) the policy wherein Facebook claimed ownership of your photos, reserving the rights to use it commercially as long as it was up, in potentially unhappy ways; b) the terrible upload quality of Facebook photos versus say, Flickr or Picasa; c) I have been continually faced with fewer and fewer reasons to ever trust Mark Zuckerberg and Co. (List not exhaustive).

I was, of course, pressured into uploading them... the better to share with friends; with family; so that friends of my-friends-who-were-not-friends-of-me could see their photos... the list goes on. Eventually, I caved in some instances, but for a long time I would upload just a few and then offer links to the full content at my self-hosted Gallery2 installation (since dead). But photos are still a good example: I don't upload anything that would be a serious problem if leaked anywhere in the world, but that DOESN'T mean that I want to share everything!

Layer 3 (reasonably known and mediated audience):

This is basically Twitter. On Twitter, I have friends who are my followers, strangers who are my followers, spam-bots who are my followers, and then of course an unknown 'n' who don't follow but find my remarks through searches, etc. I use Twitter mostly just to share links and status updates, but I actually make conscious decisions and what might be Twitter vs. Facebook appropriate when considering cross-posting (not just for character length).

This is very obvious to me because when I post something using TweetDeck, I am given a choice: Twitter, Facebook, or both? It's just one click of a button to decide, but it can make a world of difference. Some statuses, for instance when I recently warned friends of Facebook's new privacy threat, go to both. Others, such as when I retweet an interesting link that might pertain less to my broad audience of hundreds of friends than it does to my smaller 'immediate' Twitter audience, will just go to Twitter (e.g. "RT @Amanda_Lenhart: Neat infographic w stats from our Teens & Mobile Phones report http://bit.ly/98T8G9 | report: http://bit.ly/teenMobi"). Sometimes I forget about how public things can be on Twitter, and it can be unsettling when reminded of that in less than ideal contexts. Still, I assume the worst but also note that things are more casual and ephemeral and because of the medium, that's OK.

Layer 4 (controlled and maintained, but audience even less known, especially public, especially linked to me):

Here is where my blog lives. When I post something to my blog today, I expect several things. First, a few hundreds of people will see it immediately, and then thousands more will trickle by over weeks and months and get to see it. Worse, at any time, someone might just search for me and find it, or something that I wrote, that applies to something they are searching for. Sometimes this comes off very badly, sometimes things work out well. But I know no matter what that I should really be on my best behavior and put my best face forward. Even if it is equally public to Twitter, and similarly branded, my expectation is that this is the authoritative source for Sam Jackson news, and it should be treated as such. (Twitter is rolled in here, but is not the #1 feature or visible resource).

My goal is that when you search 'sam jackson' online, this website comes up, and that when you come here, visitors get a certain image of me which is favorable and beneficial to me. This has been the case over the last almost five years now. This blog has been this way for a long time - mediated, controlled - because soon after I started writing, it turned into a college blog, and I realized I was writing articles that were being read by the same admissions officers whose kind regard I required for a viable candidacy at all these different schools! That taught me very quickly a series of lessons about how to manage myself online, lessons that some of my peers would have done well to adopt, too.

-  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -

Thus, I have a series of curtain walls around my privacy castle, or so I like to imagine. I am aware that I have historically shared things which may later prove embarassing (though not devastating) by commenting on blogs all over the place as a 16 year old, occasionally saying things that would later sound stupid; or writing right here, on this very blog, dumb things. I have left them up for honesty and posterity's sake `but do get embarassed if I see hits going to certain old pages on the site. Nothing is bad but some of it, when now looking at the blog as the work of a 20 year old college student instead of a 16 year old college applicant, haven't aged as well.

The problem with Facebook is that it isn't comfortable just being used as a social utility, but is driven by some dangerous combination of ideology and desire for revenue / mission growth to expand its social web and extend its tentacles into more of your life, the better to deliver it again to advertisers. The problem is that the network effects are so great, right now you can't escape. In a world of barely-checked Facebook powers, this is a sad thing indeed.

Students don't want their whole lives exposed now, and they didn't want them exposed before. Facebook has typically had huge boosts in use when it introduces some new, privacy-busting policy. I hope that in the past week, the numerous privacy problems -- from the Instant Personalization debacle that destroyed all my likes and interests as punishment for not complying with Facebook's 'be more public' order, to the security flaw that allowed people to read friends' live chat streams -- it hasn't been a good week for them.

Mistrust of the intentions of social sites appears to be pervasive. In its telephone survey of 1,000 people, the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California found that 88 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds it surveyed last July said there should be a law that requires Web sites to delete stored information. And 62 percent said they wanted a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knows about them.

That mistrust is translating into action. In the Pew study, to be released shortly, researchers interviewed 2,253 adults late last summer and found that people ages 18 to 29 were more apt to monitor privacy settings than older adults are, and they more often delete comments or remove their names from photos so they cannot be identified. Younger teenagers were not included in these studies, and they may not have the same privacy concerns. But anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing.

It's good that others are more and more aware of the risks that they face, and are taking action to protect themselves when given the knowledge and the power to do so. The best test of this is what happens when you talk to someone ignorant of the ways Facebook may have exposed their 'private' profile information to more people than they thought -- e.g., when someone would in previous years join a 'city' network, they would by default be totally viewable to all the 10s or 100s of thousands of people who lived in that city. Not what people expect from their badge of geographic pride! But, when you would tell them that that was the case, they would be very eager to change it.

-  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -

I liked the new 'Like' button, at least before I knew how it actually worked. Everywhere there's a privacy 'problem' at Facebook, someone made a choice; the system is built the way it is by design, and it reflects a particular vision. Jim Merithew @ Wired said it well, in regards to the Like button, about how things could have been done differently.

Like” buttons around the web could be configured to do exactly what you want them to — add them to a protected profile or get added to a wish list on your site or broadcast by your micro-blogging service of choice. You’d be able to control your presentation of self — and as in the real world, compartmentalize your life.

Perfect! Too bad it conflicts with Facebook's view of the world.

At least several times a week I hear friends talking about problems arising from privacy and the world online. In many respects the efforts to reclaim 'privacy' are a losing battle, and for the savvy, the battle has shifted to controlling messaging / stories / identities, rather than keeping them out of sight altogether. I would feel betrayed by Facebook if I had any real trust or faith that the company might serve its users first, rather than caring about harvesting them for value, and taking care of them second.

The final point here is simple: I care about privacy, my little sister cares about privacy, my mom cares about privacy, and according to Pew, so do a lot of other people. This is not a new 'trend' even if people do like to share certain things with certain people. Behavior doesn't always match with beliefs, sometimes to the surprise or dismay of the actor. All the propaganda to the contrary should be evaluated for conflicts of interest and considered carefully. It is rare to find anyone who says 'privacy is dead' without a vested interest in making it so.

Zuckerberg came to Exeter in January 2007  to give an assembly... I made a bad recording of the talk and called for readers to pose questions about privacy (yes, I cared even then, and so did they!). I got tired of doing a transcription from the hard to understand audio file, but maybe now I finally have an incentive to bust it out and make an effort - I think his responses from 2006 may now prove historically enlightening. (In many respects, it was just a rehash of his Davos talk from that year).

Facebook: ... all privacy hope abandon, ye who enter here!