The Article explores possible interventions. It explains how regulatory solutions and market forces are themselves hindered by the the deficient privacy environment of Facebook and can’t solve all of its problems. This Article recommends renovating the design of Facebook to privilege privacy practices and proposes specific interventions drawn from the computer science and behavioral economics literature. It concludes with a message of cautious optimism for the emerging coalition of engineers, academics, and practitioners who care about privacy on networked publics.

The Article is a heavily revised adaptation of the thesis I conducted for Ethan Katsh and Alan Gaitenby at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. If you’ve read my thesis (entitled “Saving Face”; title changed to avoid confusion with James Grimmelmann’s excellent Saving Facebook, recently published in the Iowa Law Review), then you’re familiar with the broad contours of the idea.

Losing Face, however, has been both greatly refined in its argumentation and noticeably reworked in its format (bah Bluebook) over the last year or so. I received invaluable feedback and assistance over the last from many people during this drafting process, including Helen Nissenbaum, researchers and interns at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, but most indispensably James Grimmelmann, who helped me navigate the convoluted and mystified norms and logistics of the publication process.

I’ve posted a copy of the Article here and on BePress for further comment while it wends its merry way through the editorial process. This is a draft only, and should not be used for citation. I’ve endeavored to make all references as clear as possible, though some are not as clear as they will be in the final version because I haven’t nailed down all the infras and supras yet. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about Losing Face, please feel free to drop a comment here or shoot me an email.

The article is now up (and reproduced below the fold). Furthermore, I have a special announcement:

Today, I’m launched the Mapping Banned Books project. As you can read below, the project intends to create a grassroots, ground-up documentation of all the book bans and challenges that go on in the U.S. today. The website is still under heavy development – I’m rolling this out very quickly – but please, check it out, contribute what you can, and help us along the way. I’ll have more in the next few days.

The Brazilian state capital of Fortaleza sits snug along the northeast coast of the enormous South American nation. Its thrumming metropolitan area is home to more than 3.4 million people, and as with any city of its size, its bustling culture, cuisine, and commerce are darkened by crime.

 

In most places, residents learn about crime from police blotters, meaning they rely on a complex information chain of citizens, police, journalists to tell them about their world. And even if all those links in the information chain hold true, there’s still the problem of internalizing raw data on the pages of a newspaper and transposing it into the context of the physical world.

 

In Fortaleza, however, citizens have a choice. And that’s because a few years ago the Brazilian professor Vasco Furtado launched WikiCrimes. On the WikiCrimes Google Map, individuals can drop a pushpin near where a crime occurred and annotate it with a description of the circumstances – when, where, and how it occurred.

 

In other words, WikiCrimes does two things. First, it makes the invisible visible: it takes the data floating like jellyfish through the milieu and connects them to concrete places and times, making it easy to visualize trends and clusters out of previously abstract information. Second, it collects hitherto disaggregated information, revealing new patterns in the mental mosaic. It digests raw knowledge and turns it into useful information.

 

In August 2009, a friend of mine named Alita Edelman – about to begin her senior year at Smith College – spent a month volunteering at theAmerican Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFFE). ABFFE is a tiny organization that operates within the long shadow of theAmerican Library Association (ALA). Her job was to organize data on banned and challenged books across America. The ALA compiles these records, and every year releases a long list of what books were reported challenged where, by whom, and why.

 

The list is fascinating. It provides an incredible window into the psyche of those who challenge books in public libraries (according to ABFFE, one sex education book targeted at girls was challenged in Texas for being “happily nonphallocentric”).

But what it doesn’t do is provide a environment within the data can be understood and contextualized. It doesn’t allow for the abstract data (title, reason, result) to be attached to concrete touchstones like time and place. It doesn’t, in short, do for books what WikiCrimes does for crimes.

 

So I created a Google Map for Banned Books. I issued a strident call on my blog for contributors. My dream was that librarians everywhere – from the New York Public Library to Podunk Public – would begin placing pushpins every time a parent held a copy of Harry Potter in front of their face, demanding that this instructional manual for witchcraft and wizardry be burned like its practitioners. Of course, that didn’t happen, because I’m just some guy on the Internet, and not a media mogul with millions of eager readers with too much time on their hands. Instead, Alita and I began the arduous task of translating the hundreds of ALA records onto the map.

 

View Book Bans and Challenges, 2007-2009 in a larger map

 

The pattern that emerged was as striking as it was surprising. One commentator on Huffington Post wrote that “[s]tick a pin in each place where there’s been a challenge to a school or library book, and you’ll have a map of the United States that looks like a hedgehog in need of a haircut.” And she was correct: contrary to expectations, the challenges and bans were spread across the nation, appearing to cluster not by political or religious affiliation, but rather by simple population density. “And Tango Makes Three” – a true story about two gay penguins at a New York zoo who adopted an egg – was the most frequently challenged book in America in 2008, raising the ire of parents in Virginia and California.

 

Is this map perfect? Not even close. I don’t actually like it very much. The model is all wrong. These data, which tell us so much about who we are as a people, and to what extent we believe in deliberative democracy, are too precious and fragile to pass through so many filters and failure points. I’m willing to bet that for every challenge reported to the ALA, a dozen more go unrecorded. There are holes in our mosaic. It’s a Magic Eye: the patterns are there, but distorted, visible only if you squint, and then only if you’re lucky.

 

So what can we do?

 

We can start by spreading the word to librarians and civil libertarians across the country. Before the ink is dry on an official challenge form, bibliophiles should be dropping pushpins onto a massive map, so that we can detect patterns in censorial sentiments as they arise.

 

We need to reverse the communications model that built this map. We shouldn’t be getting these data from the ALA: the ALA should be getting these data from us. Someone from Los Alamos shouldn’t have to go through Chicago to find out if a book was banned in Albuquerque. It’s time for we who favor free speech to converse amongst themselves, networking our knowledge of censorship like we’ve networked our computers and phones. I want a WikiCrimes for book bandits, documenting dangerous assaults against the free flow of information and ideas.

 

So today, we’re launching the Mapping Banned Books Project We’ve created a new Google Map, one which is totally open to anyone to edit from the comfort of their local library and will rely upon concerned and active individuals to provide the critical data. The idea goes something like this: when a book is challenged at your local library, you get a copy of the formal documentation, scan it, and upload it. Then you drop a pushpin on the location of your library and provide a report of the book challenge, the reasons why it was challenged, and link to the documentation for verification. As more and more people begin to use the map, we’ll see more and more data, visualize new patterns, and learn new, wonderful, and terrifying things about the world around us.

 

It won’t be easy. The site is still under development, and we’re all busy people with too many things to do and not enough time. We’re going to have to get word out to all the people in big cities and rural towns who might be able to contribute to the cause. Such a massive undertaking won’t be easy, but here’s the good news: it’s easier than it’s ever been before, and we owe it to ourselves to give it an honest try.

 

 

Chris Peterson is an Associate at the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution. You can find his blog at http://www.cpeterson.org/

 

 

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.

Professor James Grimmelmann of New York Law School was kind enough to give my Facebook working paper a shoutout on his blog. In case you haven’t read it, his article on Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy (forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review) is probably the best work done in this field thus far.

He’s a swell guy who has been very helpful orienting me in academic space and teaching me fun new words like desuetude, which is really the point of an intellectual mentor anyway.