When I singed up for Facebook three years ago, I immediately set my privacy settings to private, which meant that only people I was Facebook friends with had could view my complete profile. Non friends could only see my profile picture and which networks (Portland, OR and Phillips Academy) I belonged to. After feeling secure that my profile wasn’t open to the entire word, I thought nothing of posting photos and personal information.
Initially, I found that Facebook allowed me to connect to old friends. My old au pair who lived with my family when I was nine found me on Facebook. She lives in France, and I hadn’t seen her since she lived with us. I friended a lot of my former classmates from my old school in Portland, and I friended my cousins who live throughout California. I posted photos from family vacations and regularly updated my status with such boring details as “Going to New York City on Wednesday” and “Three finals down, one to go.”
In the three years since I first opened my account, the Facebook layout has gone though numerous different designs, the privacy settings have constantly changed, and more and more features have been added. I remember when the status still included the mandatory “is”. Margaret Bonaparte is… Each time the layout changes, the privacy settings seem harder and harder to manipulate. Facebook now earns money from advertisers, and the more information you make public, the more money Facebook earns. A New York Times article, “Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline,” published on May 8, 2010 reports on young people’s increasing awareness of just how little privacy they have online.
The article mentions a study conducted last July by U.C. Berkeley. The Berkeley Center for Law and Technology conducted a telephone survey on 1,000 people on Internet privacy. 88% of people aged 18 to 24 believed that “there should be a law that required Web sites to delete stored information.” 62% of people aged 18 to 24 “wanted a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knows about them.” I know that if I were asked these questions, I would say that yes, web sites should be required to delete stored information. It’s creepy to think that even if you delete your Facebook profile, the data is still stored online and accessible by the company.
Nothing on Facebook is every really private. Last spring, a boy from my old school was expelled. My old school was a private pre K-12 day school in Portland, Oregon. The boy, an eleventh grader, had a sibling at the school and a grandfather on the Board of Trustees. When an underclassmen girl reported receiving several racial comments in her Facebook honesty box, the school contacted Facebook in order to identify who had posted the “anonymous” comments. If someone chooses to have an Honesty Box on their profile, anyone else can post anonymous comments into the Honesty Box. However, the school convinced Facebook to reveal the name of the student who posted the racial comments, and he was expelled. While I don’t condone racism, his comments act as a wake up call to remind us that nothing on the web is really anonymous.
Facebook maintains that Facebook is an optional application, and that no one is forcing you to post all of your private information for the public to see. While this is true, it’s hard to imagine giving Facebook up now. Facebook has such a presence in the life of young adults, especially in highs school and college students. When I slugged through college applications last fall, I was reminded that I should be aware of what my Facebook profile revealed about me. If an admissions officer were to see my profile, what would they see? While I know people who temporarily deleted their profiles until May, many, including me, kept their profiles. However, in a few years, while applying to grad schools and for internships, the same privacy issues will undoubtedly come up. One wanders if users will eventually protest as Facebook continues to take away more and more of our privacy.
Works Cited
Holson, Laura M. “Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline.” Nytimes.com. The NY Times, 8 May 2010. Web. 11 May 2010.
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