Chris Peterson

Via Eva Galperin for EFF:

Speaking last week on a panel discussion about social media hosted by Marie Claire magazine, [Facebook Marketing Director Randi] Zuckerberg said,

“I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away. People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.”

Let me note at the outset that Randi Zuckerberg was not completely wrong. People do tend to behave better when they have their real names – or, more specifically, their “real life” – attached to the things they say or do on the Internet.

That’s because shaming works. I don’t think that’s a controversial statement. And Facebook has gotten a lot of mileage out of shaming. They don’t call it shaming, of course. They have some fancy name for it – RealSocial or something, I forget – but Chris Kelly, the former Facebook Privacy Officer, used to talk about it all the time. Here’s him describing the policy in high-minded terms in The Facebook Effect:

We’ve been able to build what we think is a safer, more trusted version of the Internet by holding people to the consequences of their actions and requiring them to use their real identity.

So, premise: tying people’s online identities to their “real” identities will, through shaming and social norms, make them behave better, or, more precisely, more like they do “in real life.”

I don’t think anyone disputes that.

The problem is in the conclusion: that, because this premise is true, “anonymity on the Internet needs to go away.”

Eva, the author of the EFF post, already hit most of the usual (but worth reiterating!) points why the conclusion is total bullshit: because “activists living under authoritarian regimes, whistleblowers, victims of violence, abuse, and harassment, and anyone with an unpopular or dissenting point of view that can legitimately expect to be imprisoned, beat-up, or harassed for speaking out” benefit from anonymity and pseudonymity (which the Facebook policy also prohibits). It goes without saying that anyone with an elementary education – and I mean literally an elementary education, we’re talking Federalist Papers here – should be able to appreciate the importance of hiding your name in order to speak your mind. And it goes without saying that we should all be glad that Randi Zuckerberg is not part of the IETF.

But I’d like to make one other connection here.

This fetishization of onymity (yes, that is the antonym of anonymity!) is not an isolated blemish on the face of Facebook. It is but one of several symptoms of a deeply rooted disease: Facebook’s love of radical transparency.

Read danah boyd on Facebook and radical transparency before you read any more of me, but the practical upshot is that Zuckerberg – Mark this time – has said repeatedly that, basically, the world would be better off if everybody was open about everything all of the time, and that anything short of that was a “lack of integrity”.

Now, anyone who has read their boyd, Warner, Goffman, Meyrowitz, or even Jarvis (or even me) will realize how almost unbelievably dumb – or shall we say “conceptually incoherent” – this statement is. No one actually lives like that. That’s not how social norms work. That’s not how privacy works. And Zuckerberg, of course, does not himself live a radically transparent lifestyle either, or else you’d be able to see a whole lot more on his Facebook profile.

But I want to underline the fact that the Zuckerbergs are not merely wrong in their pathological obsession with radical transparency and “real identity.” They are wrong in a way which actively hurts people. Again, not to crib too heavily from boyd here, but there are reasons why things like pseudonyms and privacy settings matter. They don’t really matter to people like the Zuckerbergs – people who have money, education, protection, and prestige. They matter to the subaltern.

Think about it for literally one second. What it means to be “radically transparent”, and how it affects one’s lived experience, depends entirely on one’s position in society. More concretely: being “radically transparent” about, say, sexuality, means very different things to a straight male student and a closeted gay student in a homophobic, conservative high school context. That’s a very simplistic example, but a very powerful one. And dismissing those concerns is more than merely incorrect. It harms those who are the most vulnerable.

If you ever wondered why Facebook is one of the most hated companies in America, you can stop now. The answer is evident. It’s captained by fools – or brigands. And when (not if) the karmic collapse comes – when something finally arrives to take Facebook’s place – there will be no love lost for it.

Nor will it deserve any.

e: a Facebook employee who I know and trust sent me some thoughtful comments via email. Without quoting them in full, they boil down to: despite whatever crazy things the Zuckerbergs might say to reporters, we engineers actually spend a lot of time trying to work within the existing privacy infrastructure, and to make it better as we can.

And I believe that’s true. Facebook has actually has pretty powerful privacy settings for a long time, even if they are hidden and poorly publicized. But I don’t think (most) of the rank and file engineers at Facebook are into radical transparency. I think they are basically smart people working on a really tough and complex piece of software, and they’re trying to keep it working and keep making it better, and don’t have enough time to make grand announcements about anonymity or really set policy going forward.

I just think the fish is rotting from the head.

Must admit that my blood boiled a bit on the very first page of the CQR white paper at this:

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly” because of the dominance of social network sites — where people use their real names — and the extent to which information is now shared online, said Zuckerberg. That’s good, he said, because “having two identities for your- self is an example of a lack of integrity.”

(emphasis mine)

When I was in high school, I once gave a presentation on the Watergate scandal, in which I referred to Nixon as “for lack of a better word, a scumbag.” A few conservative teachers on the panel mildly reprimanded me, arguing that, whatever shortcomings Nixon may have had as a human being and political leader, surely there must be better, more precise, and more meaningful words than scumbag.

But sometimes, you have to call a spade a spade, and a scumbag a scumbag. And Mark Zuckerberg, for lack of a better word, is a scumbag. There are perhaps better, more precise, more meaningful ways to describe someone who, after citing as justification the evisceration of privacy of which he is the prime butcher, has the nerve to say that those who wish to keep their contexts intact have a “lack of integrity.”

I could go on, for some time, for how conceptually incorrect this is (but I think I’ve written enough about that in Losing Face), and for how absolutely richly pathetic it is for someone whose fame and fortune derives from a stolen business (itself founded in order to take petty potshots at a girl with the good sense to turn him down for a date) to accuse others of a “lack of integrity.”

But brevity is the key to writing as well as wit, and so I’ll happily settle to call him a scumbag.

Two days ago, Facebook rolled out new privacy tools in a blog post by Mark Zuckerberg.

On balance, the privacy revamp represents a net benefit from where we were in the last few months. For example, Facebook has finally returned to users the ability to control basic information such as whether or not complete strangers can see your hometown.

Additionally, their new privacy dashboard (as illustrated below with a picture from the site):

Is a helpful way for people to begin to visualize what is available to whom if they select one of Facebook’s settings.

But – as is so often the question in policy problems, from health care reform to financial reform to Facebook – the question is not whether the reform is better than what we had, but actually “good enough” to be truly praiseworthy. By way of analogy, of course it’s better to throw a rope to a drowning man than to not throw one at all, but if he is 10 feet from your boat and the rope is two feet long, the effort may not be as laudable as it initially appears .

What more could Facebook have done? It could’ve made Instant Personalization Opt-In. It could’ve integrated some of the great tools like the Facebook Privacy Scanner or Zesty.ca profile mirror. It could’ve shown people what they currently are sharing and tweak it from there on the Dashboard, as opposed to simply giving them four options to pick from (although the four options are good for simplicity’s sake). Finally, it could’ve announced these changes in a big box on everyone’s News Feed – or forced them to visit the new privacy page the next time they visited the site – rather than hiding it in plain sight on the Facebook blog, which almost none of its users read.

I’m not pointing these things out just to complain about Facebook – I’m pointing them out to demonstrate how much Facebook didn’t do in their privacy reform. That doesn’t mean I don’t approve of the changes they did make – I do. But to understand the full context of Facebook’s actions, one must understand what they did and didn’t do. And in that respect, it’s still the latter that is far more striking.

From his Op/Ed in WaPo today:

The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information. Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.

…

We have also heard that some people don’t understand how their personal information is used and worry that it is shared in ways they don’t want. I’d like to clear that up now. Many people choose to make some of their information visible to everyone so people they know can find them on Facebook. We already offer controls to limit the visibility of that information and we intend to make them even stronger.

Here are the principles under which Facebook operates:

— You have control over how your information is shared.

— We do not share your personal information with people or services you don’t want.

— We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.

— We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.

— We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.

This is garbage. Facebook designs a confusing environment, intentionally removes the ability of users to make certain information private, and uses the power of the default to shoehorn users into “Instant Personalization” and other expansive programs – and then responds with a wide-eyed, “who, us?” denial and misleading protestations of innocence and earnestness.

These are crocodile tears.