The Importance of User Education in Privacy
Posted by Jonathan Kleiman on February 7th, 2008 10:54 AMI’ve been having a back-and-forth with an acquaintance of mine over Facebook for a while now. Whenever I see him post pictures of his young grandchildren I send him a message warning him that his Facebook friends can see them, and that perhaps his privacy settings should be stronger.
Every time he asks me “can you see them now?” and every time I say “yep” a few times until he finally fixes it.
I also have a friend who bragged to me that she has very few contacts, and that nobody can see any of her pictures unless she adds them as friends. Well, she was right. At least, she was right about all of the pictures that hadn’t at one point been used as her profile picture (which happened to be virtually none of them). All a person would have to do to access them is message her and any response would open up her not-so-limited profile.
She certainly didn’t know that this was the case. Does she realize that applications encourage me to add her pictures to a public database, like the celebrity face matcher that I mentioned earlier today?
I’m not making any complaints about Facebook’s privacy settings. In fact, aside from the Beacon fiasco and the fact that applications can access my pictures through my friends’ profiles, I’m generally very impressed.
I’m merely suggesting that the average users may be overconfident in their sense of privacy. Is it Facebook’s responsibility to make sure we take the time to learn how to use the site’s were using properly? Also, is there really any legitimate expectation of privacy?
… and if not, and we’ve entered the public sphere by joining Facebook, will this have legal implications? People who enter the public sphere give up a ton of privacy rights.
Let me know what you think.
- Jonathan Kleiman
April 30th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
I agree that user education and awareness is the best thing that can be done regarding this matter. Peoples life are becoming more and more public as digital media allows for easy creation and replication of information be it pictures, blogs etc. While this is something which is going to increase, i think specially ethics(privacy, intellectual property) in using such social software needs to be taught, who are best suited to do this?, Librarians?