Chris Peterson

So I’m rewriting my senior thesis to explore possible publication options in different law reviews. If anyone out there read the original thing and has any feedback I’d be much obliged if you shared it with me.

My revisions are mostly streamlining and refining the argument. I’ve also got to come up with a new name as Grimmelmann’s Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy has been retitled “Saving Facebook” for forthcoming publication in the Iowa Law Review.

Below is excerpted a draft of my new introduction.

Everybody And Their Grandmother
On April 12, 2009, a college student named Rachel broadcast a distress signal out into the electronic ether. “my grandmother just friend requested1 me,” her Facebook status read.2 “no. Facebook, you have gone too far!”

It’s not intuitively obvious why such a simple request should bother Rachel so much. After all, Rachel and her grandmother are very close. She trusts her grandmother. She confides in her grandmother. She tells her grandmother “private” things. She is certainly closer to her grandmother than to many of her Facebook Friends. So what’s the big deal?

Rachel explains:

Facebook started off as basically an online directory of COLLEGE STUDENTS. I couldn’t wait until I had my college email so that I could set up an account of my own, since no other emails would give you access to the site. Now, that was great. One could [meet] classmates online or stay in touch with high school mates [but it]has become a place, no longer for college students, but for anyone. [About] five days ago, the worst possible facebook scenario occurred, so bizarre that it hadn’t even crossed my mind as possible. MY GRANDMOTHER!? How did she get onto facebook?…As my mouse hovered between the accept and decline button, images flashed through my mind of sweet Grandma [seeing] me drinking from an ice luge, tossing ping pong balls into solo cups full of beer, and countless pictures of drunken laughter, eyes half closed. Disgraceful, I know, but these are good memories to me. To her, the picture of my perfectly angelic self, studying hard away at school, would be shattered forever. 3

Rachel isn’t the only Facebook user facing this sort of social dilemma. Some members of the popular social networking site have been shamed,4 expelled,5 fired,6 and even arrested7 because of content posted by them or their “Friends” to the site. Many more have experienced less dramatic but quite uncomfortable social tensions that arise from unexpected encounters like Rachel’s.8 And all of them characterize these many and varied troubles to be problems of privacy.9

The most obvious and interesting question to ask here is why. Why do these problems occur? Why do members of Facebook regularly share such sensitive information with so many people? Why do they routinely underestimate the breadth of their disclosure and so poorly assess the risk involved? And, with all of these well-known dangers, why do users continue to flock to Facebook?

Some have argued that users of social network sites are members of a generation of exhibitionists who just don’t care about privacy.10 This viewpoint is completely contradicted by behavioral data11 and ethnographic accounts.12 Members of social network sites, as a rule, care deeply about privacy, and worry terribly about the sort of problems posed to Rachel and others. Any argument which presumes they “just don’t care” is counterfactual to its core.

Other analyses engage these social dynamics provide more credible explanations. For instance, Professor James Grimmelmann compellingly argues that users “have social reasons to participate on social network sites, and these social motivations explain both why users value Facebook notwithstanding its well-known privacy risks and why they systematically underestimate those risks.”13 Grimmelmann presents an exhaustive account of the social dynamics of Facebook, explains how these practices and norms give rise to privacy problems, and describes a number of policy interventions that mesh with the social milieu of Facebook and therefore might actually do some good.

Grimmelmann’s is far and away the best analysis of this phenomenon in the legal literature. It is a crucial component of a larger conceptual framework to explain privacy phenomena in networked publics. It is part of an ongoing conversation between jurists, behavioral scientists, and engineers about how to understand and approach privacy problems on social network sites.

This Article contributes to this conversation by exploring another critical and complementary part of the problem: the environment of Facebook. The environmental element of the Facebook privacy problem has been neglected in the legal literature to its detriment, as any study of privacy that does not engage the environment within which privacy practices occur is conceptually incomplete. Privacy and the environment are inextricably linked: the successful practice of the former depend upon the dynamics and heuristics of the latter. As the behavioral scientist Irwin Altman explained in The Environment and Social Behavior:

Environment and behavior are closely intertwined, almost to the point of being inseparable. Their inseparability says more than the traditional dictum that “environment affects behavior.” It also states that behavior cannot be understood independent of its intrinsic relationship to the environment and that the very definition of behavior must be within an environmental context…What is now called for [is] recognition that the appropriate unit of study is a people-environment unit.14

In other words, privacy is mutually constituted by the individual and her environment. They are interdependent variables: changing either input changes the privacy output. That is why an environmental analysis is so important: the physical world and Facebook have extremely different information architectures and so are necessarily different when it comes to practicing privacy.

Whereas Grimmelmann and many social scientists focused on the “people” part of Altman’s unit, I’m focusing on the “environment.” To that end, this Article conducts a complementary and comprehensive analysis of the privacy environment of Facebook, provides a conceptual framework for understanding how its information architecture impacts user privacy practices, and describes various interventions by markets, law, or code and why they are likely or unlikely to help.