Privacy Control for Facebook Photos and Basic Information

Privacy Control for Facebook Photos and Basic Information

Livia Wang 26047920
Yuliya Yevdayeva 51137495
Anthropology
University of California, Irvine

Introduction

Ever since the early 1990s, cyberspace has revolutionized and redefined communication in the actual physical world. In cyberspace, anything is possible and the imagination is limitless. People can express themselves liberally such as sharing their opinions, interests, or philosophy to inventing a new identity or identities. Personal information whether real or fake and viewpoints are usually published in cyberspace to portray a certain persona. The availability and continues flow of information makes privacy a crucial issue for social networking sites such as Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc (Ito 2008). Due to problems with privacy issues from the past, users of these personalized sites may now pick and choose who their audiences are when information is shared. People can have vigilant or laissez-faire attitude towards the privacy of their online identity (Zywica 2008).
For this research, the focus is examining privacy control on Facebook, specifically Photos and the Basic Information box. A person’s Facebook account is often seen as en extension of one’s being. As mentioned in class, when you create an account, you create an avatar. People form these representations of themselves with the understanding that their “friends”will use those representations to judge and evaluate them. Individuals’ audiences on Facebook are considered “friends” and can only be on that selective list if both parities mutually approve each other. The amount of information an individual’s audiences may have access to is controlled by the privacy settings of that individual (Zywica 2008).
History: Facebook is an online social networking site founded by Mark Zuckeberg and his fellow classmates from Harvard University in early 2004. Its popularity soon gained many big time investors’ support and by October 2008, Facebook has gone international to people as young as 13-years-old with valid email address. Facebook allows its users to create personalized profiles, play with a wide array of games, share photos and videos, make event announcements, be in different interest groups, and other applications (Zywica 2008).
According to the article "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy" by Clive Thompson (2008), Facebook is becoming the Big Brother of the Internet. With the development of the News Feed Thompson argues that, "Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For students, it’s like being at a giant, open party filled with everyone you know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying, all the time". Also Matthew J. Hodge’s article “The Fourth Amendment and Privacy Issues on the ‘New’ Internet: Facebook.com and Myspace.com”, brings into question the legitimacy of these privacy settings and whether or not they violate American’s Fourth Amendment right.

Method

Facebook Photo: The research study on Facebook Photo Privacy is using the Naturalistic Research Approach and the data collected are qualitative. An interview survey was used to gather information on how and why people choose certain photos to be published on Facebook and what privacy settings are used. The questions were open-ended and related to privacy issues on sharing Facebook photos albums, tagging people in pictures, setting limitations of who can see the photos, and profile picture. There were a total of five questions along with a short description of the purpose of this research and a confidentiality statement; see Appendix A. For part of Question 5, we used a rating scale on the level of privacy they are permitting when using Facebook Photos and in life offline. The scale ranged from 1 to 5: 1 being very private and 5 being very public.
Participants: Participants in this research were “Friends” on Livia Wang’s Facebook. The questionnaires were sent using Facebook Messages to 25 randomly selected people from approximately 700 friends. Most of Livia Wang’s friends on Facebook were from Southern California in the Orange County and Los Angeles areas, with a vast majority between the ages of 20-30 years old.
Facebook Basic Information: To investigate Facebook users’ interpretation of privacy in regards to one’s basic/personal information, we used an interview method. Two offline personal friends with Facebook accounts were chosen for the interview. The interviews were held either on campus or by visiting the participants’ homes. Before starting the interview, the participants were informed about the reason for the research, why they were chosen, and confidentiality. There were no specific questions used; instead, key points are brought up for open discussion with open-ended questions. Information from the interview was recorded on a notebook for data reference, along with significant meanings of body language. The approximate time for each interview was 20 minutes.
Participants: The interviewees were female UCI students, ranging between 21 and 22 years of age. They are chosen from Yuliya Yevdayeva’s Facebook friends. After looking over several profiles, we chose these two because they varied substantially in the amount of information they disclosed on their Facebook profiles. The participants were given alias names, Amy and Beth.
Facebook Wall: The survey consisted of five questions regarding privacy settings and how well respondents felt their information was secure. It was intended to separate and analyze the different privacy settings allowed on Facebook. It also was intended to shed light onto how much the ability for others to see their history and postings navigated their Facebook activity.
Participants: We found participants for the Facebook Wall component of the research by asking ten different people to complete a survey we put together regarding their feelings of privacy towards the Facebook Wall. Since the survey was short and did not require that much writing, we had respondents complete the survey at the time we gave it to them. The respondents were all males between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two.
Results
Facebook Photos: Nine out of 25 people responded to the online Facebook interview survey. These nine participants answered all the questions and agreed to have their responses be used in this research. They were given code names to represent their identity: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, and I. The demographics of the participants are two heterosexual males, one homosexual male, and six heterosexual females between the ages of 20-25 years old.

Data from Responses:

1) All the participants browsed Facebook photos of their friends at least once a day to few times a day. 2) The responses for uploading photos on Facebook were to share them for admiration, socialization, attention, interest, and entertainment. 3) Privacy settings for photo album access were set differently for every participant as they restricted selective group or people for each album. The main reason for privacy control were to avoid negative drama. 4) The tagging and detagging were most commonly used to protect self-esteem and criticism from other people. 5) The participants’ had mixed opinions on their privacy level for using Facebook photos and offline. However, their ratings comparing Facebook and offline were within 2 points; see Appendix B.
Facebook Basic Information: The reason open-ended questions were used in the interview was to allow the participants to go off tangents and talk about privacy and Facebook liberally. Putting past anthropology knowledge to use, sometimes it is those tangents that provide the most crucial information and it is the interviewer’s job to roll with the punches and adapt to the person being interviewed. The reason for choosing these two friends over posting a survey on a Facebook group for random people is the level of accessibility with real life friends. The face-to-face interaction also provides information from not only from the participants’ responses but also their body language. The first participant, Amy, had a very restricted profile. The only information on her profile is her graduating class, date of birth, e-mail, and high school attended. In contrast, the second participant, Beth, had a very extensive written profile, which included complete lists of favorite music, movies, books, etc.
We were very curious to know how my informants viewed privacy on Facebook and how this view affected their choices of providing or withholding certain information on their profiles. When one member of our group asked Amy why she chose to reveal so very few details on her profile, she told us that she felt if she provided a lot of information on her page, people viewing her page would base much of their view of her on what they read in her profile. She told us that even though she is in a relationship, she left it out of her profile because those Facebook friends that she communicates with regularly on Facebook or in real life, already know she is involved with someone, and those who lost touch with her but remain her Facebook friends do not necessarily need to know. Amy went on to say that she chose not to state that she is conservative and a Christian because, in her opinion, that would invoke ideas of an ultra-conservative religious fanatic in those viewing her Facebook page.
We then asked her whether Facebook’s latest transformation led her to purge her profile of all details of her life She told us that that had a lot to do with it. Before the introduction of Facebook’s News Feed, she felt a lot more comfortable in filling out her basic and personal information, and if she chose to edit something, no one but her would know. News Feed changed all of that. Some see it as a positive change. Others, like Amy, see it as negative one. In “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy,” Clive Thompson states, “When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed, the first reaction, generally, was one of panic. Just about every little thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out to hundreds of friends.” Like many other students, Amy felt uncomfortable and felt that even with all of the privacy settings, some things still made News Feed. Amy said that she restricted News Feed as much as she could and still information of her approving someone as a friend would get published. She expressed to me that she found it “annoying” and wondered why any one would find that interesting. Amy also mentioned that the only way she would start providing more information on her profile is if Facebook goes back to its “simplistic” ways.
Beth’s Facebook profile varied from Amy’s greatly. In contrast to Amy, who left a lot of information out, Beth filled in everything that could be filled in. In her Favorite Movie section she gave two lengthy lists of her “current favorites” and “all-time” favorites. Under her Contact information she included two e-mail addresses, her AIM screen name, phone number, and a link to her Myspace page. One member of our group asked Beth why she felt so comfortable displaying so much information about herself on her page. She told us that she does not mind providing her personal information because she wants to keep everyone updated on her life at the moment. She understands that not everyone will ‘get’ her based solely on her profile. She added that she got a Facebook account to communicate with her existing real life friends, and not to create new friends over the internet. We asked her if the idea of people seeing her updates via News Feed made her uncomfortable. Beth told us that at first she felt a little uneasy about it but eventually got used to the idea. She said that she was a little freaked out when News Feed first came out and that she felt that she had to monitor everything she did on Facebook so nothing private got out.
But now, she does not mind it at all. Beth is not the only one who went from disliking News Feed to eventually accepting it. Many had an initial shock before adapting to it. As Clive Thompson states in “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy,” after the initial backlash, “users’ worries about their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their friends.” Overall, she has a positive feeling toward News Feed, but at times she does feel like she is stalking people. Beth mentioned that sometimes finding out that someone is no longer single or just broke up feels like a kind of ‘forced intimacy’ to her.
Facebook Wall: The results to the research were interesting. Through the survey we found that many people do not hold privacy to be of the utmost importance. Many of the interviewees were not even aware of the privacy settings available through Facebook. However, when it came to wall privacy everyone had their own feelings toward what they did and did not want other people to see. Most decided that when it came to their recent history it was not important for others to see whose walls they had written on. Many also admitted to deleting groups they've joined and accepted friend requests. For the most part it appeared that there was a sort of limited censorship towards the wall and it depended on how each person felt about each particular piece of information.

Analysis

Facebook Photos: The participants’ active use of Facebook Photos shows the prominence of this application on a social networking site. Especially for the younger generation, going online is built into their daily routine. Facebooking is an activity that fulfills multiple purposes from catching up with friends, sharing opinions, and entertaining oneself. As for using Facebook Photo, the participants’ reasons for uploading and tagging pictures is for acceptance, likeability, and sociability (Niedzviecki 2008).
These reasons may be correlated with motivations to boost self-esteem and popularity. According to Zywica (2008), the level of self-esteem and sociability is correlated with Facebook user’s level of privacy. Both social enhancement and social compensation hypotheses can be used to explain how people determine their privacy settings. Social enhancement is when people with more developed offline social networks enhance them with more extensive online social networks. Social compensation is when people who perceive their offline social networks to be inadequate compensate for them with more extensive online social networks.
These self-esteem characteristics may be associated with the need for popularity. Facebook is an environment where people socialize online so popularity status naturally exists just like it does in the offline world. On Facebook, people can share pictures of themselves, friends, landscape, etc. Personal expression through photos makes self-esteem an attackable target, as people can be supportive or critical in their comments. Since compliments are positive reinforcements that boost self-esteem and popularity, Facebook users are more motivated to upload and share pictures that will achieve social acceptance. Often these pictures are not only attractive and interesting to the user but also target their audiences’ taste. Through sharing photos, people with high self-esteem want to enhance their popularity, and people with low self-esteem want to compensate their lack of attention (Thompson 2008 & Zywica 2008).
For example, participant H has less than 200 friends on Facebook and her photo albums are open to everyone in the general public. Her profile picture and some of self-portrait album pictures are in very revealing clothing and implied nude poses. These risqué pictures attract a lot of attentions, especially from guys, some of which are not even her friends. Participant H’s response to the survey shows that she enjoys the attention and nice comments for her pictures as it makes her feel good about herself. In fact, she is a very studious girl who rarely goes out with friends. Therefore displacing attractive photos compensates for her lack of attention from people in the offline world.
On the other hand, participant I exemplifies the social enhancement theory as she has over 1,000 Facebook friends and shares selectively with them. Her photo album includes outings with different groups of people almost every weekend. Her response to the survey shows that she enjoys her social company in the offline world and sharing photos is like a “playback of how much fun [she] had with [her] friends”. Sharing group photos of her friends is enhancing her popularity in the offline world, as these pictures convey to her audience that she is fun to be with and has many friends.
Also users may selectively choose their audience to share the photos with. The implementation of the different privacy options to limit people’s access may be correlated with self-presentation, person’s effort to express a specific image and identity to others. For the participants, they have an image to portray and protect so they tend to share to people that will approve and value similar ideologies. For example, some participants have family members who will not find drinking an acceptable behavior so these audiences’ access to certain Facebook pictures will be limited. The participants are presenting themselves of a preconceived image to protect themselves from negative reinforcements such as punishment from parents for going out partying on a school night (Thompson 2008).
Besides controlling one’s own photo privacy, the tagging tool may also be used to control personal privacy in other people’s photo albums as well. This comes extremely handy for getting rid of a disapproving photo. Impression management may explain why the participants feel good about having Facebook users set up their profiles in order to suggest a certain image to viewers whether their real self, ideal self, or even made-up self. One type of impression management is ingratiation, which manipulates appearance, personality, or behaviors to project greater attractiveness. These behaviors are not always conscious or intended as the environment in the offline society often sets a mold to what attractive characteristics. People that fit the mold usually gain acceptance because others are more likely to want to befriend someone who portrays characteristics within the norm (Thompson 2008). .
Hence, the participants want to put up photos of them that persuade images that will impress their audiences such as popularity, beauty, athleticism, success, etc. Photos that hinder such portrayal will be detagged because unflattering images are privatized to eliminate its negative impact to self-esteem and likeability. Like participant B says “I don’t wants an ugly picture of me flowing around for everyone to see, eww!”.
The same concept of impression management applies of for tagging people as well. Some participants tag significant friends, places, or things pictures because pictures are the evidence of their life offline. People typically want to be associated with others with same ideologies. For this reason, the participants tag photos that affirm and support their online persona. For example, participant E works as a promoter for night clubs, so in order to convey her socialite qualities, she tags pictures of the celebrities and trendy spots. Another reason to tag people is to maintain or reinforce existing offline persona and relationships. For example, Participant C will befriend people he has shared a picture with on Facebook and give them limited access to his profile. The photos and tags help him maintain a relationship with people he meets offline (Zywice 2008).
The reasons for uploading and tagging pictures on Facebook are determined by the level of privacy users feels towards expressing themselves online. Some people are more public about sharing photos with their audiences than others. This can be seen from the ratings in Question 5 as participants compare their privacy level online and offline. The variations in the rating scales between the participants may just be due to individual differences.
Facebook Basic Information: One essential part of an individual’s image on Facebook is their written information about themselves that a user may or may not choose to post. This information includes things such as gender, relationship status, sexual orientation, political/religious views, and favorite movies, just to name a few. When filling out Facebook details, some of the information provides a window in which one can write anything they please. But other information, like gender for instance, only gives two options, where one box has to be checked off. With all of the available opportunities to express oneself in their written profile, some Facebook users choose to leave certain information out. This was seen by our group as an area of interest which we chose to explore further.
An array of reasons contributes to people’s decision to include or withhold certain information from their Facebook profiles, but one thing remains constant. The information that I got from my interviews seems to imply a link between one’s definition of privacy on Facebook and how much they are willing to reveal in their profiles. Some, like Amy, see the Facebook News Feed as a violation of their privacy; therefore, she is hesitant when it comes to divulging her life’s details in her profile. But others, like Beth, are now much more comfortable with the idea of News Feed and do not mind having their stories shared with their networks. It is this relaxed attitude toward Facebook privacy that allows users like Beth to provide insight into their lives without feeling violated.

Facebook Wall: This research is very important. It reflects the relationship between users wanting to show and know personal information and their desire to keep it private. According to Thompson (2008), the biggest problem Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, faced was trying to find a point of equilibrium between gossiping and confidentiality. At first many users were outraged by the emergence of the News Feed, which showed the most recent activity of all Facebook users. This led to the implantation of the basic security features, such as who could see one's profile and what they could see. Almost everyone accepted this new form of privacy. This shows that while people like reading other user's information, statuses, and wall posts, not all of them are comfortable with others reading their personal information. This was interesting to me because I thought that many people would want to keep all of their information private. In today’s time, where pictures of underage adults drinking and partying can have devastating consequences, I thought it almost certain that privacy would be one of the main concerns on the internet.
There are actually companies whose job it is now is to search through these social networking sites to find incriminating pictures of college athletes, offspring to celebrities, and other political figures. A great example of this was in October of 2005 at the Penn State vs. Ohio State University football game. After Penn State upset Ohio, thousands of fans rushed the field of play and the mob of celebration almost broke into a riot. The police were overwhelmed by this massive onslaught of fans and were only able to make two arrests that day. However, a week later the police received a tip that some of the college students had posted pictures of the game on Facebook. Using this information, campus police identified and referred about fifty alleged student offenders to the university’s office of judicial affairs. Social networking sites such as Facebook are becoming an increasing effective tool for law enforcement officers.

Discussion

Online technologies have transformed the way people socialize today. In the cyber world, people can engage in a board range of activities such as searching information, visiting chat rooms, downloading music files, corresponding over email, browsing blogs, playing in virtual worlds, and others (Williams 2006). Facebook Photos is like an online photo diary people may use share to their audiences for support, opinions, or communication. This makes browsing Facebook like the big brother of the Internet, recording every move its user make. As Zuckerberg explains that part of Facebook’s success is “stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of” (Thompson 2008).
Limitations and Future Research: There are a few limitations that pose threat to the validity and reliability of the research for Facebook Photos. The interviews are gathered from a small number of participants, which diminish the results to be generalized to a larger population. Also it is difficult for the research to be completely objective since the data need to be interpreted and not quantified due to the nature of method that is used to gather data. Therefore future research may consider a larger sample size and quantifying the surveys so the results will be more significantly valuable. As for Facebook Basic Information, only two participants are interviewed due to the limited amount of time to conduct the research. Future research on this subject may include a much broader interviewee group consisting of both males and females.

References:

Ito, Mimi et al. Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project. MacArthur Foundation: 2008.
Niedzviecki, Hal. Facebook in a Crowd. New York Times: October 26, 2008.
Thompson. Clive. Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. New York Times: Sept. 7, 2008.
Williams, Dimitri. Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as “Third Places.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11(4), article 1: 2006.

Appendix A:

I am conducting a research for my anthropology class. The purpose of this research is to better understand the issues regarding Facebook privacy, specifically on photo sharing. There is no minimum or maximum length of your answers to any of the following questions. Your response will be totally confidential in my research, and I will assign code names for you such as “Participant X”. Please answer honestly and your participation is greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Questions:
1. How often to you browse other people’s photos on Facebook? Why?
2. Why you upload and share photos of yourself, others people, objects, etc. on Facebook?
3. How do you manage your privacy settings on Facebook Photos and how do you choose who gets to be on that limited list where they do not have access to those photos?
4. Do you privatize or publicize pictures of yourself on Facebook by the tagging and detagging option? Why?
5. Do you think your level of privacy is the same when using Facebook Photos and in the offline world, or are you more reserved in one environment than the other? Explain? Also using a scale from 1 to 5: 1 being very private and 5 being very public, please rate yourself for both using Facebook Photos and offline.
Appendix B