College admission offices monitor Facebook? Really?
Sarcasm aside, this shouldn’t surprise anyone, but judging by the fact that the ‘Prince’ recently ran an article about this practice, it must be news to some. Still, isn’t one of the biggest advantages of Facebook supposed to be the privacy it offers compared to competitors like MySpace? Clearly, if the site is useful as a tool in the hands of Dean Rapelye, we don’t have as much privacy as we’d like to think.
This problem isn’t built into Facebook’s design, though. Rather, it’s the result of our tendency to add friends in a manner inconsistent with the way we use the site.
We think of Facebook as a network of friends, not as one of acquaintances. We use it to share weekend photos, to post status updates about inside jokes that might shock Aunt Mavis’ sensibilities and to have “private” conversations (on each other’s walls, of course, so that friends who see them in their News Feeds have the opportunity to comment). In an online network of true friends, this wouldn’t be a big deal.
But few of us reject more than a handful of friend requests. Many of us do have our profiles set to reduce strangers’ access, and the site does allow us to limit what certain groups of friends can see. But most of us are willing to add “that tall, lanky guy from lab” and “that bouncy girl from high school gym class” without hesitation or restriction. What harm could it do?
In short, having a wide network of online friends adds privacy loopholes. In some cases, people like high school administrators, college admission officers and employers can take advantage of students’ lack of stringent privacy settings. But even careful students have no control over the photos that their friends post online. These photos, even untagged, are still available to anyone who has access to these friends’ profiles. Is it inconceivable that as some of us enter the same professional circles, unintentional access might be provided to potential employers who know our Facebook friends?
The people who operate Facebook know that we aren’t very selective about who we accept as friends, and recent privacy-reducing changes to the site suggest that they want to encourage such behavior to increase membership and page views, with Twitter as their inspiration. As the site moves to make more content public, it runs the risk of magnifying the problems inherent in its not-so-private nature.
It’s not all the fault of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO. He did not dictate that we add near-strangers as friends. Rather, the culture of allowing acquaintances full access to our profiles emerged on its own. The truth is that we reap the benefits of Facebook’s combination of an assumed level of privacy and a de facto lack of privacy. Without this dynamic, we wouldn’t be able to Facebook stalk people we barely know. That’s why Facebook will never give in to the demands of people like the 9,332 members of the “Find out who is looking at your Facebook profile!” group. Such changes would ruin the fun.
This is unsustainable. We don’t want our employers (or our grandkids) to see this stuff. So are we going to abandon social networking en masse? Probably not. It’s possible that Facebook will come up with a way to deal with these problems — though the company seems determined to make them worse. Instead, we’ll probably have to opt out of Facebook earlier than we might like because it won’t be able to guarantee our privacy to a degree that we’re comfortable with. Ideally, some Facebook clone for adults that is more substantial than LinkedIn will emerge, and many will migrate to it, following an unwritten rule that acquaintances don’t deserve to be added as friends. But make no mistake: Preserving our own privacy will ultimately require us to give up the Facebook stalking we know and love.
Jacob Reses is a freshman from Linwood, NJ. He can be reached at jreses@princeton.edu.
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