Party Lines

There’s been much made of Facebook’s privacy policy, in recent days. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to refer to their privacy policies in the plural, since they seem to be a bit of a moving target, changing at the whim of their customers. (What, their customers are the users? Nonsense. Facebook’s customers are marketing firms.) Last week the Social Media Club of South Florida even held a forum called Facebook: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Of course, the overall opinion of the panel wasn’t too difficult to anticipate, given that it was primarily promoted on Facebook itself, and that their Facebook page is updated more frequently than their web site. Nonetheless, there were some bright people on the panel, and some interesting points were made.

There were two primary camps:

• “If people are too stupid to check their settings it’s their own fault.”
• “If you are posting private information on-line you are an idiot.”

Other positions were occasionally sounded, but they were barely heard over the contempt shown toward ordinary, non-technical people, the kind of people struggling with assimilation into the new American (and global) culture. This attitude is not merely wrong-headed and insensitive, but it is likely to hurt the future growth of the connected society.

From the time my parents were young through until my childhood our telephones were party lines. For those of you who have never heard the phrase, party lines meant that your telephone shared the same connection to the phone company as your neighbors, and often the entire block. If you picked up the phone to make a call you would often hear other people talking, in the midst of a conversation. You couldn’t make a call until they disconnected, giving you a dial tone. (For those of you who have never used a wired telephone, a “dial tone” was a buzzing sound indicating that you could now enter the number of the person you were trying to call.) Etiquette required that if you interrupted the call you just hang up immediately; the other parties would almost always hear a click on the line, giving a clue that someone was now eavesdropping, but it was possible that you might miss it. The very nature of party lines made the telephone a non-secure communication system, and everyone knew it. Hell, in rural areas you often had to speak to an operator and ask her to place the call for you, with no guarantee that she’d hang up after doing so. There was no expectation of privacy when using the telephone.

Once the phone company (only one, back in those prehistoric times) started offering private lines, the expectations changed. Your conversations were assumed to be private, as long as you were certain your little brother hadn’t picked up the extension in the bedroom. Instead of “Hey, meet me for coffee, I’ve got some juicy news,” the juicy news was shared directly. Of course, law enforcement wanted to hear the juicy news, too, and so we got wiretapping laws. The expectations changed again, but only a little, since it was made clear that the police needed to convince a judge that they had a legitimate reason to invade your privacy. When wireless phones came into vogue audio voyeurs and criminals (and some police) turned to frequency scanners to listen in, as well, but people still assumed their conversations were reasonably private. After all, society was treating it that way.

On the web front the early Internet users were actively encouraged to use a nom du web, allowing a reasonable level of anonymity and privacy. This helped give the early web its culture of free speech and flamboyant rhetoric, even though those pioneers — having a higher than standard level of technical expertise — knew that methods existed for tracking down the person behind the pseudonym. The involved parties also understood that e-mail was somewhat secure, if only via the unreliable method of “security through obscurity.” However, this anonymity and privacy was seen as anathema to the commercial and political interests moving on-line. More people started to use the Internet, most of whom had at best a vague understanding of the principals involved, and little to no sense at all of “netiquette,” as the early culture was called. Between the commercial interest in eliminating anonymity and the general decline of respect through the erosion of its value system, the Internet became a place where everyone expected to know your name.

In an extension of this trend, and in parallel to the increase in social media services, the web’s next big battlefield is in the field of identity management. A few years ago — during the worst of the post-9/11 hysteria — there was half-hearted legislation proposed which would create an Internet ID card, possibly tied to the National ID card. It eventually failed, but now the concept has been picked up by corporate entities. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter all want to become the official arbiters of personal identity. In the near future, if you want to leave a comment on a site, or possibly make a purchase, you’ll need to prove you are the person you claim to be by verifying it with the database at one of these companies, or another of their ilk.

This will have interesting repercussions as it becomes mandatory, either through actual regulation, or through cultural acceptance. For years people have lost their jobs or potential jobs due to corporate investigation of employees’ private lives, and this trend is only growing. Previously it was illegal and/or cost prohibitive to dig that deeply into the background of a sales clerk in a department store. Now it’s a routine practice. People still did the same (potentially scandalous) things they did before the advent of the Internet culture, but they did them in localized — if still public — settings. Companies don’t need to hire an investigator to find out their potential VP likes to drink if her friends are posting pictures of her showing off lampshade couture on Facebook.

And this brings us back, once again, to Facebook. It has effectively managed to recreate the AOL of the ’90s, combining chat, e-mail, games, blogging, and link-sharing into a single portal. When I taught a corporate “How to use the Internet” class in the early ’90s, the most common question I had was “Isn’t the Internet the same thing as AOL?” For an increasing number of users, Facebook is now the Internet. At this point it has no competition, and has reached such a high level of cultural acceptance that most regular Internet users — even the computer illiterate — feel they must have an account, just to keep up with their friends.

Currently many young people — having grown up connected — assume they have a limited amount of privacy at best. Therefore to keep from blowing up their future with some ill-chosen remarks, they create multiple identities. They will have a Facebook page under their real name, one in which they are studious, only “like” socially responsible activities, and keep their noses clean. Then, in complete violation of Facebook’s policy, they create secondary accounts with fake names, fake e-mail addresses, and only allow their friends to see them: a self-contained culture reflecting the true reality. Now they can use the media they’ve grown up with for fun, and for learning about the world, while still painting the right picture to college recruiters and potential employers (not to mention the police).

But those less computer savvy are in for a tough time. When they originally signed up for Facebook they were told their information would stay private, and would only be shared with their self-selected and approved friends. This gave the users a reasonable expectation of privacy when using the service, and thus created a culture based on that expectation. Unfortunately, Facebook continues to switch users from private lines to party lines, in a seemingly random fashion. Their “improved privacy policy” is still so labyrinthine as to seem at home in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil: it’s a joke to think that anyone unfamiliar with the intricacies of the connected world will be able to figure it out. This has brought us to a place where some people expose their lives to the world, completely unaware that they have done so, and also one where others simply choose to lie.

Why force people to act as if Big Brother is watching their every move on-line, and treat them as idiots if they don’t understand deliberately obscure policies? While creating a fake account is simple and effective, do we want to foster a culture that further undermines authenticity? Is it really in our best interests to allow digital privacy to reach a level of outrage similar to e-mail spam, and bring in government regulation?

This is a complex issue, and one for which there aren’t any easy answers. However, stating “If you don’t like it don’t use it” or suggesting that “If you put pictures of your kids on-line you deserve whatever happens” is the kind of simple-minded arrogance that aggravates the problem, rather than solves it. Sadly, this dismissive and short-sighted attitude is what I hear most often from social media’s self-appointed gurus and experts, many of whom have forgotten the sensation of being lost in an unfamiliar world, and few of whom have mastered the basics of social interaction. I can only hope that minds more sensitive to the actual needs of ordinary people will be addressing this growing problem.

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