A very disturbing article titled Privacy and Social Media: It’s Complicated by Jim Naureckas was published at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting on Friday. It’s disturbing in that it was written by Jim and published at FAIR.
I like Jim. FAIR once tweeted a post of mine from here to their 12,000 followers, so you know, I fucking love FAIR. But this is so messed up I feel it must be answered.
The article is about the sudden buzz around the new social media site Ello due to a backlash against Facebook. The first sentence sets the tone:
The new social media site Ello went viral last week with its promise of an ad-free social network that doesn’t invade its users privacy–pointedly unlike Facebook.
Or perhaps the first sentence would have set the tone if the next word wasn’t:
Yet
Yet, Jim writes, Ello doesn’t seem to be so great about privacy either. Rather than get right into detailing what’s wrong with Ello Jim first writes an ode to Glenn “Vote Libertarian" Greenwald’s privacy-from-government crusade complete with a hefty quote from Glenn’s new book about Edward “Social Security Hurts My Freedoms" Snowden’s NSA leak.
People sometimes talk about privacy like it’s a single thing that people want more or less of, when it’s really a number of different things that people put different values on. One kind of privacy is freedom from government snooping
There it is.
the famous “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Despite its appearance in the Constitution, the US government does not believe in this sort of privacy.
I’m sorry, what’s happening?
As Glenn Greenwald convincingly documents in his book No Place to Hide:
Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: The US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe. The agency is devoted to one overarching mission: to prevent the slightest piece of electronic communication from evading its systemic grasp.
Jim, please stop.
Given the government's technological and legal power, it's unclear that any social media network could ever really guarantee this first kind of privacy. Presumably there could be a breakthrough in cryptography that would allow for truly anonymous social networking–though this would provide a haven for the antisocial (stalkers, cybercriminals, etc.) as well as those who just don't want the government to be rummaging through their email. Ideally, privacy-from-government would be restored with a Supreme Court decision that reaffirms that the Fourth Amendment means what it says: that government needs to have a reason to suspect you before it intrudes into your personal space.
In three paragraphs since his “yet” Jim managed to get ten references to the government into this article specifically not about the government. The backlash against Facebook was caused by “a Facebook crackdown on drag performers who use their stage names on their personal pages.” It has nothing to do with the government.
Wanting as much of our personal information as possible, Facebook insists that our account identify us by our real name.
In defense of Jim, part of the reason people are reluctant to give information out online is because of the NSA’s policy of intercepting that data and even storing it without a warrant. In this context however it’s not all that relevant. Worse, it seems an intentional distraction, like when the NY Times publicized a Google PR video showing how they protect you from illegal search and seizure in the same week it was reported that Microsoft had accessed a journalist’s email without a warrant and had someone arrested based on the mail’s contents. Something they, Google, and Facebook can do legally. It’s legal search and seizure.
Legal search and seizure? Well, they’re seizing it. And they are most certainly searching it. And it’s legal. So that’s legal search and seizure…by an immensely powerful corporation.
Corporations don’t have our democratic power to create a warrant but they don’t need it. Internet companies have been able to industrialize the legal transfer of ownership of our intellectual property and private information over to themselves. They do this by default with monopolistic power and privacy policies so complex, vague, and intentionally misleading that no one should agree to them without legal counsel.
Billions of people on the planet can’t obtain legal counsel even in the most dire situations, much less each time they click to a different web page or use a phone. This is no small matter.
if businesses you might want to buy things from have some idea of what you want to buy, that’s far from the worst thing about capitalism.
I argue being required by default to waive my rights and surrender my property in order to use any device or service produced by or for internet communication is one of the worst things about capitalism.
This advocate for corporate concerns argues that the societal good companies can do by forcing us to waive the rights he just demanded for himself trumps the value of those rights.
Personally, I’m impressed with the ability of Netflix to guess what movies I’m going to like; its ability to get inside my head is part of what I pay the company to do.
This is what gets inside my head when I read that sentence.
Another kind of privacy is the ability to be anonymous–and this kind of privacy is driving much of the excitement about Ello
As with advertising, the distortion created by the profit motive is a big part of the problem here: Facebook expects performers to use what it calls “brand pages” rather than personal pages for their artistic personas
Jim is rightly critical of Facebook’s extortion of advertising dollars for what is actually user generated content, not advertising, but I’m not sure he fully makes that distinction.
FAIR once reported how NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams announced “there is consumer product news tonight” and then informed the audience Hamburger Helper wants to be thought of as more than just helper. NBC failed to inform us why they named their product Helper if they wanted to be thought of as something else, but they did tell us it was news.
That’s unacceptable, of course. What’s worse is if the company that makes Hamburger Helper does a lot of advertising on the show one assumes Williams won’t be reporting that their processed carbohydrates are killing us. Regardless, anyone who is watching Williams pimp for Hamburger Helper is doing so because NBC is producing a product. That is not the case with Facebook. Facebook is a platform. It’s possible that Hamburger Helper could drive traffic to Facebook, as opposed to Helper paying NBC for access to their traffic.
The same is true of a non-commercial nobody like myself. When FAIR or someone else tweets a link to my blog here or retweets something I said, even if there were only 1,000 instances of that showing up in the feeds of other users, that’s still a fairly significant donation of my intellectual property to the Twitter platform.
I’m not sure there’s a case to be made that any demands on my privacy, attention, or wallet are justifiable considering I’m part of the user base that generates all of the company’s value, both with my use and content production.
The strength of Facebook is that it overlays a virtual network on top of your already-existing real-world connections
By strength Jim means power. Facebook’s power is its monopolistic control of internet traffic. Of course there is an intrinsic irony here. Namely that the more monopolistic power Facebook has the better the user experience. The more people using a platform the more connections you can make. But the same is true of any monopoly.
It’s not that people simply resent if one company is able to provide a service better or cheaper than anyone else. All monopolies must be doing something right. Rather it’s monopoly pricing that we legislate against.
In the case of Facebook’s monopoly pricing we are being charged for our own labor as we produce the content of the site. We are paying Facebook with our attention to their advertisers. Worst of all our very privacy is sold as a commodity.
We grant Facebook monopoly power by choosing to use the their platform. We can regulate this power through our government or we, as users, can choose to grant it to someone else instead. What I don’t understand is why tolerating monopoly control over information is even an option, much less one to be insisted upon by an anti-corporate media watchdog organization.
Facebook was not an original idea. Just as Ello wants to be Facebook, Facebook wanted to be MySpace. Facebook provided platform service without advertising at the start as a deception in order to get us to provide them with monopoly strength.
Apparently that was okay for Facebook but it’s a bum idea for Ello.
it’s difficult if not impossible to do that [overlay a virtual network over your already-existing real-world connections] when everyone is going by an improvised pseudonym
This is the first of two uses of the word “impossible” as Jim contemplates the idea of taking away Facebook’s monopoly in favor of a different platform.
Facebook’s pestering you about where you work, where you went to college and where you were born is useful for selling ads, certainly, but it also facilitates linking people together from different walks of life.
Where I was born, work, and my level of education is more information than I want to give Facebook or its advertisers and the choice of who is able to locate my account by my personal information should be left up to me, even if that answer is NO ONE.
by not enforcing the real-name rule too firmly, the company can accommodate these needs without making it impossible to use the site to find your best friend from third grade
Again, “impossible.” By impossible does Jim mean requiring the simple step of entering the name of a school and a year and seeing if anyone has made the choice to link their account to that specific and common search method? If someone’s name from your third grade class doesn’t show up in such a search it’s because they don’t want it to. Take it from a creepy stalker, the right to use the internet anonymously is not something to argue against.
As far as Jim’s fear that I may be missing out on some really great advertising; Facebook can still track my internet use and tailor ads specific to me based on my user activity no matter what I call myself or what private info I provide. It’s still me whether I use a pseudonym or not. I’m writing these things, I’m navigating these pages, and I’m the one seeing the ads.
Jim clearly implies this is not true:
If you want to be who you are and still choose who you’re talking to
Whether I use Umfuld Johnson or my real name, Cumion Smith, I’m still me. If there’s a way for me to be someone else I’m all ears!
We create the value of these platforms with our content and voluntary use. What we badly need is a demand for legislation against monopoly pricing, not yet another pathetic plug for internet billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s PR firm.
Just to give you one more thing to think about regarding Facebook’s data collection here’s Mark Zuckerberg’s opinion of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act:
That will be a fight we take on at some point. My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age.