In his “Saving Facebook”, Grimmelmann explained the “social dynamics” of privacy problems on Facebook. He canvassed the social science literature to explain how and why people used Facebook, and what their behavior could tell us about proper regulation and privacy protections.

But in this article, he’s honing in on what I’ll call the “design dynamics” that he explored in his first article – that is, how the design of Facebook (or other such services) relates to its privacy problems. This idea isn’t new – he calls them “privacy lurches” in Saving Facebook, and they’re somewhat the focus of my “Losing Face” – but what is really great about this article is how Grimmelmann maps product liability law onto the scaffold of social network sites.

For example, on Google Buzz:

“Buzz as a whole is a powerful, possibly revolutionary product—but it also launched with a serious design defect. Just as an otherwise-useful buzzsaw is still unreasonably dangerous to life and limb if it sports a flimsy handle, the auto-add feature made the otherwise-useful Buzz unreasonably dangerous to privacy.”

In “Losing Face”, I mostly gave up on law as a tool to fix the defective designs of social network sites. I’m interested, and excited, by Grimmelmann’s effort to adapt liability law to achieve an admirable end.

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.

Basically, Facebook is introducing a new Publisher that gives people easier access to (and more granularity over) what they publish to whom. While I don’t have access to the new Publisher yet, here’s what I told Marshall yesterday:

Then my tentative comment is that it’s a huge step in the right direction. The tremendous social utility of the Publisher (and the posted-links functionality before it) was always compromised by very limited (and limiting) privacy controls. Audience and appropriateness are inversely related: as the audience of Facebook broadened, the sort of content one could appropriately post to it narrowed. I know I began to self-censor much more after I became Friends with a few bosses and relatives. In this sense, robust privacy controls don’t only benefit users, they also benefit Facebook, because the more secure users feel in the Facebook environment, the more they feel like sharing.

To that end, this is a good move. Whether the technical execution will work is another question, but I’m glad to see that Facebook has this on their radar.

I feel like that is fundamentally true, and it’s still a nutshell argument of my thesis. Hopefully Facebook is taking this in the right direction, although I am still concerned about some of the defaults. Facebook is giving its users new tools, but not necessarily a new environment. That’s good, but it’s not best, and we’ll see how this plays out.

Anyway, if you’re here from the NYT or RWW (or elsewhere I suppose) welcome. I’d love to hear any of your thoughts on my research (as I’m trying to revise/develop it into something a little more revised – I wish Marshall had specified it was simply a working paper).

Shoutout to danah boyd too for sending out the tweet that got this on Marshall’s radar.