1. Fatima Shaikh
3/12/2015
Bus, Govt & Society
Taylor
The Death of Privacy?
Facebook and Privacy in our Changing World
In 2010, Mark Zuckerburg, Eric Schmidt, and Steve Jobs declared privacy
dead (Weinstein). These are three major players in the shaping of our world- Eric
Schmidt is the past CEO of Google, Steve Jobs is the late CEO of Apple and Mark
Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook- so it proves worthy to glean some insights
into their declaration.
For those who may be unaware, Facebook is the popular social media site
launched in the year 2004. Lack of privacy is an issue that has hounded Facebook
and there has been controversy over Facebook’s privacy practices. In fact,
Facebook could be considered anti-privacy if you consider a statement of
Zuckerberg’s: that Facebook is designed to increase the efficiency and
transparency of communication (Baloun 2007, Smith 2008). This can mean full
disclosure of a user’s activities to everyone on their friend’s list. The site’s Terms of
Service say that people must use their real names, information and identities and
only use the service to connect with “real world contacts” (Arrington 2008).
Personal information and a user’s activities are stored in something that is basically

2. a large database, where the information can be “analyzed, manipulated,
systematized, formalized, classified and aggregated” (Raynes-Goldie 2010).
Companies analyze every word and every click of Facebook users (Westin 2013). If
you see how much users post on their wall, you begin to wonder if these users care
at all about privacy. And consider how many users Facebook has: 1.19
billion monthly active users, 874 million mobile users, and 728 million daily users
(Google); this is a lot of people who seem to not care about their privacy!
However, according to Acquisti and Ralph Gross’s 2006 study (which looked at
university-aged Facebook users) even though Facebook users shared personal
information, they still felt that privacy was a very important issue-even more
important than terrorism (Raynes-Goldie 2010)!. What does this mean? Do users
care or not care about privacy?
Let us explore the question.
In January 2008, Kate Raynes-Goldie conducted a year-long ethnographic
study of a small group of socially connected 20-somethings in Toronto, Canada.
At the time, this area had the second largest regional Facebook network.
Surprisingly, all participants of the study mentioned privacy concerns on Facebook.
However, these users were not concerned with institutional privacy-such as what
Facebook as a company or its partners might do with their personal information-
they were concerned with social privacy. Social privacy means they were

3. concerned with controlling access to their personal information from other users
rather than Facebook or its partners.
Raynes-Goldie’s study participants had many privacy concerns on
Facebook. They were worried about things like how to handle an “inappropriate
friend request” from a boss or a student they were teaching. The individuals in the
study worried about unwanted people finding them and contacting them. A boss
might see pictures of social friends that the individual doesn’t want him/her to see.
Participants were worried about the lack of control they had over the information
shown on their walls and the photos that they were identified or “tagged” in.
Hearing this, some individuals may be quick to point out Facebook’s privacy
features, but these features are complicated and don’t allow pre-screening friends’
comments or stopping others from tagging them in pictures. One individual
complained how when he joined new regional networks Facebook would
automatically set all his photos to be shared with everyone in the network.
Raynes-Goldie also discovered that individuals have found ways to go
around the privacy issues of Facebook. Some individuals in the study use aliases,
even though that is against Facebook’s Terms of Service. Some individuals in the
study also delete wall posts and photo tags on a regular basis, but it can be time-
consuming because it has to be done manually.
Social privacy is not new. It is part of a more broad definition that includes
expressive and informational privacy (Raynes Goldie). DeCew defines informational

4. privacy as the protection of personal information relating to daily activities,
finances and lifestyle. DeCew defines expressive privacy as the desire to protect
oneself from the influence of peer pressure or ridicule and to be free to express
one’s own identity and it is the ability to control what is said about you. If
informational privacy is violated, so is expressive privacy. Facebook violates both
informational and expressive privacy because it turns all self-expression and
communication on the site into information which is stored in a database that can
store and reproduce its information. Raynes-Goldie says that her participants were
concerned with how, when, and who could see their personal information that they
had provided, comments others left on their walls or photos they had been tagged
in.
Social privacy has changed over time. Pre-Facebook-from the late 1970s
until recently-privacy was largely understood to be as informational and
institutional. This means that people of this time, when asked about privacy, would
say something about how governments, banks and other businesses use their
personal information (Raynes-Goldie).
Raynes-Goldie found that privacy pragmatism explains how Facebook users
still use Facebook even though users worried about social privacy. By 2003, people
who are concerned about their privacy but willing to trade some of it for something
beneficial had risen by 10 percent to 64 percent of those surveyed (Taylor 2003).
This is what Raynes-Goldie found in her study- that Facebook users still use

5. Facebook because they are willing to trade some of their privacy for gaining some
benefits of the site. The amount of people who take this stance is substantial (64%
by 2003 (Taylor 2003)). This shift towards “privacy pragmatism” was reflected in
Raynes-Goldie’s findings with her Toronto, Canada’s participants, as well as in
Zeynep Tufecki’s 2008 study of university–age Facebook and MySpace users in the
United States.
Having a Facebook account is not without coercion. It is very important to
one’s social life to be on the site. Facebook is replacing phone and email as the
preferred way to interact, and is more and more vital as a way to keep in touch
with friends and family. However, this is not without costs and many people who
abstain from Facebook feel more and more left out. There is much pressure to be
on Facebook as it permeates our lives, and the era of Facebook has forever
changed the issue of privacy (Raynes-Goldie 2010).
So is privacy dead? I would think not; it is alive and more critical to consider
than ever. It is important to realize that it would be to Facebook’s advantage to
have less privacy or if privacy was dead because that would mean the flourishing of
Facebook. To this end, Zuckerberg has made it difficult to be private on Facebook
and periodically pushes people to be more open about their information. This is
because it is to Facebook’s benefit since a lack of privacy would mean more
sharing and posting on Facebook which would mean more ad revenue, other forms

6. of monetization such as selling of information, and a bigger entrenchment and
visibility of Facebook in daily life.
Why is the privacy issue so critical for Facebook? It is important to note that
privacy pragmatists are simply giving up some privacy for the benefits of the
Facebook site. If they do not perceive the benefits to outweigh the costs of the
privacy they give up, they will not relinquish some of their privacy. Also, the
younger generation is overwhelmingly becoming privacy pragmatists (Raynes-
Goldie 2010).
So what should Facebook do if they wanted to do something about their
users’ privacy concerns? I would make sure that the benefits always outweigh the
costs of being on the site. I would look into more about how people perceive
privacy psychologically, which is partially done through this paper. I would also
research tactics to get users to open up more because this issue is so central to
Facebook’s success. I would advise Facebook to take a more gentle, subtle way
of pushing people to open up more rather than scaring them of each new
“transgression” into users’ privacy (psychological tactics would be important for
this). I would take users’ privacy concerns into consideration in a respectful way. I
would make the privacy features simpler, intuitive, and easy to use. These are
critical moves because privacy will become a bigger and bigger issue in the future
(Taylor 2015) and if Facebook takes proactive steps now they can prevent any
mishaps that would be harmful for the company down the road.

7. References
Acquisti, Alessandro and Ralph Gross, 2006. “Imagined communities: Awareness,
information sharing, and privacy on the Facebook,” Privacy Enhancing
Technologies (PET) Workshop, pp. 36–58; version at
http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/projects/facebook/facebook2.pdf,
accessed 12 March 2015.
Arrington, Michael. 2008. “Facebook isn’t a social network. And stop trying to
make new friends there” (15 September), at
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/15/facebook-isnt-a-social-network-
and-dont-try-to-make-new-friends-there/, accessed 12 March 2015.
Baloun, Karel M. (2007) Inside Facebook: Life, work and visions of greatness.
Victoria, B.C.: Trafford.
DeCew. Judith Wagner. 1997. In pursuit of privacy: Law, ethics, and the rise of
technology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Google Search Engine response.

8. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+users+does+facebook+have
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Raynes-Goldie, K. (2010, January 1). Aliases, creeping, and wall cleaning:
Understanding privacy in the age of Facebook. Retrieved March 12, 2015,
from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2775/2432
Smith, Justin. (2008). “Live notes from Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at F8 Developer
Conference,” Retrieved March 12, 2015.
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/07/23/live-notes-from-mark-
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Taylor, Glen. 2015. Lecture Business, Government and Society.
Taylor, Humphrey. 2003. “Most people are ‘privacy pragmatists’ who, while
concerned about privacy, will sometimes trade it off for other benefits,”
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