Dylan Mathews

Privacy Piracy: An Evaluation of Facebook's Privacy Policy and the Relationship Between Social Media and the Average User

Introduction

Our research project essentially means to investigate two primary areas of interest: (1) the degree to which Facebook upholds its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy with regard to users deactivating and deleting their own Facebook accounts, and (2) how deeply integrated social media—in this case, Facebook—has become in the daily life of an average user. In the age of information, privacy has become an increasingly difficult luxury to come by; in cyberspace, as the availability of and access to information is gradually becoming more democratized, the personal space between individual users is gradually diminishing. We hope in our research project to shed more light on how this phenomenon is occurring and what it means to individual users.

Annotated Bibliography

See the entitled page in the blog (link provided here): http://soc49facebook.blogspot.com/p/biblography.html

Data, Methods, Ethics

Due to how difficult it was to find research relevant to our specific topic, we as a team decided to collaboratively archive an ethnography of our own experiences in daily logs for data. In these daily logs, individuals within the team catalog their daily lives with or without regular access to Facebook and provide insightful commentary on their particular experiences. Below is my own daily log:

Day One (3/6/12): Individuals within the research team today were divided into three sample groups which consisted of (1) those who were to delete their Facebook accounts, (2) those who were to deactivate their Facebook accounts, and (3) the control group, those who were to continue to use their Facebook accounts. Team members may participate in more than one sample group simultaneously. I volunteered to participate under the Deactivation subgroup and the Deletion subgroup, wherein tomorrow I am to deactivate a Facebook account that I regularly use and to delete a Facebook account (under an alternate alias) which I sparingly use. In the mean time, I'm frequenting Facebook as I normally would in order to reflect on how I use my account(s) such that my data analysis will be comprehensive.

Day Two (3/7/12): I've deactivated my primary Facebook account and initiated the process of deletion for my secondary Facebook account today. Both tasks were easy to carry out, but I find it perplexing that Facebook requires of me to state the reason as to why I'm deactivating/deleting my Facebook accounts. I understand that a service provider may be curious as to why users would suddenly refrain from using its services, and that a service provider may request input from users which expresses why they do not wish to use its services, but that Facebook requires me to state why I wish to permanently or temporarily disable or remove my accounts before they are disabled or removed is questionable. Further, my secondary Facebook account cannot even be deleted until after an interval of 14 days has passed since my initiatory action was taken. Why? Also, the link which directs you to the page where I could delete my account was virtually impossible to find without onerous digging—I actually ended up Googling the link because I was wasting so much time searching for it. I will take note of this for my analysis.

Day Three (3/8/12): Second formal team meeting today, discussed further endeavors for our research and reflected the absence of Facebook together. Many members of the Deactivation sample group and the Deletion sample group voiced inconveniences. Some of Deactivation and Deletion are unable to access accounts on other websites like Spotify because they had originally signed up those accounts through their Facebook accounts, which were now deactivated or deleted. I generally assure that my particular activities in cyberspace doesn't revolve around one means of access—in this case, a Facebook account—and as such I can still remain active on websites which offer that option. So, I'm not terribly inconvenienced by the loss of access to my Facebook account, as the majority of my activity in cyberspace isn't contingent on Facebook, but it's occasionally disappointing not being able to “know what's up.”

Day Four (3/9/12): Temptation is starting to set in; I removed a link to Facebook in the bookmarks feature of Internet browser to hopefully divert my attention from it. I've asked multiple friends to confirm that my accounts were offline, including anything that I directly posted through those accounts, and received consensus that they are untraceable. So far so good—Facebook's promise of securing one's account from public view upon deactivating it is holding up for now. I will continue to test this over the next several days.

Day Five (3/10/12): I suspect I'm exhibiting the early symptoms of FOMO Syndrome. While surfing the Internet in my spare time, I occasionally come across something I find worthy of sharing with my friends on Facebook. I want to post a status update on Facebook expressing how awkward it feels not being able to do that—I'm irritated that I can't do either. I then want to post a status update about how irritating it is not being able to post about my irritation—to my further irritation, I'm not even able to do that. I may have underestimated how this is going to affect me; it's going to be a longer week than I thought.

Day Six (3/11/12): Who is Joseph Kony? I've been asking this question all afternoon. I haven't been online much at all today, so I haven't read any news outlets, but (apparently) I should have known about this. Many of my friends' Facebook updates were flooded with Jason Russel's activism video against Joseph Kony, and it's been a hot topic of conversation. Because of my disconnection from Facebook, I've been ill-equipped to participate as effectively as I could otherwise if I was updated from my friends.

Day Seven (3/12/12): The temptation to log onto Facebook is enthralling at this point. Even ignoring the quasi-social stigma that comes along with not being up-to-date with the latest information, I enjoy reading posts from my friends. I deem there a difference between the majority of my Facebook “friends” and my personal friends, but my relationships with my personal friends are further deepened through becoming Facebook “friends.” While it can be simply a procrastination outlet, I miss regularly using a Facebook account chiefly for the aforementioned reason.

Day Eight (3/13/12): I reactivate my Facebook account tomorrow. I've performed searches on Spokeo for any information that could be connected to my deactivated and deleted Facebook accounts, and I couldn't find anything that would trace me back to those accounts.

Analysis

This project has hopefully shed light on the relationship between individual users of social media websites 

like Facebook and the privacy policies that may be ensured by those websites for their users.

As evident above, I was a part of the Deletion sample group. I deleted a Facebook account that I occasionally use as an alternate alias (which I prefer to remain anonymous), and, if I hadn't explicitly told anyone, would not likely be traceable back to my primary Facebook account, which is used under my legal name. Upon when I sat down to delete my Facebook account, I was bewildered by how difficult it was to find the option to delete my Facebook account. As far as I can tell, there ar eonly two possible links for deleting a Facebook account: one appropriately placed in the Privacy Policy, and the other seemingly hidden in the “Help Center.” It was relatively easy to find the link to deactivate my Facebook account—after clicking “Account Settings” and then then entering the “Security” page, it's the final option toward the bottom of the screen. However, finding the link which allows me to permanently delete my account was an onerous search. After about 15 minutes of meandering through “Account Settings,” I got agitated at how much time I spent searching and eventually Googled “how to delete a facebook account.” The first result directed me to a page on Facebook's “Help Center.” This particular page with the quote can be found in the Help Center after navigating under “Basics,” then “Explore Popular Features,” and finally “Profile.” Upon inspection I found the deletion link subtly enclosed in a phrase (which I embolden for indication):

“If you would like your account permanently deleted with no option for recovery, log in to your account and then submit your request here.”

Why must I submit a request to delete my Facebook account? Facebook's Data Use Policy states with reference to an individual user that “you always own all of your information,” and that “[i]t typically takes about one month to delete an account, but some information may remain in backup copies and logs for up to 90 days.” If a user technically owns all of his/her information that he/she decides to post on Facebook, and Facebook essentially provides a service which stores any information we post, why must Facebook take so long to do away with the information individual users own? If individual users own their information, then in theory they should be able to do with it what they will per Facebook's Privacy Policy which assures such. It's curious to note that Facebook doesn't explicitly say what information is stored in backup logs, or why they must even be stored in backup logs if the individual user who owns the information wants it removed. While I am open to scrutiny and correction, I view this as a violation of privacy, one that the language of Facebook's Privacy Policy as it is now is too vague to adequately address. If I own my information that I decide to post on Facebook, I should be able to do with it however I desire whenever I desire; I don't believe that Facebook has the right to store the information I own for any amount of time if I wish that information to be removed from its website and services.

From my own data it is clear that, on a social level, in the absence of having a Facebook account, I have been ignorant of currently ongoing popular events that originate from cyberspace. While I was of course open to read news outlets that cover major current events, I could not be a primary source of the news in some cases. For instance, in the case of the rising activism against the tyrannical regime of Joseph Kony, the popularity of which largely being due to public sharing on Facebook, major news outlets online provided coverage on the impact Jason Russel's “Kony 2012” video had on the public who had seen it. Moreover, these major news outlets also covered the collaborative efforts of users form around the world who stood behind the message of the video and sought to spread the word. For me, without access to my Facebook accounts, I couldn't adequately participate in civic engagement online. This example demonstrates just how out-of-sync one may become from being just a week or so offline—while I may eventually hear of these current events, I will have been late to the party, as it were. As such, I felt pressured to log back onto Facebook in order to delineate the social stigma that had come my way and get up-to-date with current events. Participation in social media thus has become just as quintessential to my social life as interacting face-to-face with my friends and colleagues. If I'm not continuously online—if I'm not plugged in—then I can't adequately engage in my community as I otherwise would have.

And, in closing, it is worthy to mention ongoing rumors about Facebook's mobile applications. Our research team has heard by word-of-mouth and read online rumors that Facebook, upon agreeing to its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy when downloading its iPhone application, is allowed the right to access the iPhone's text messaging application for Facebook's own researching purposes. These rumors go further to say that Facebook is conducting this research because it plans on constructing its own messaging service which will be similar. While we investigated into these rumors and could find no convincing evidence that this was the case—a representative for Facebook is even quoted to have denied those allegations. Regardless of whether or not these rumors are accurate, it demonstrates how deeply integrated social media has become in the daily life of the average user—either social media has indeed infiltrated our daily lives in dissecting our personal information or it has become too close for comfort that rumors are being perpetuated about how deeply integrated social media has become in the daily life of the average user.