I can still remember the first time I heard about the social networking site Facebook. I was warming up to play tennis with the rest of my small private high school’s Varsity Tennis team. The seniors on the team at the time were bragging to one another that they had been invited to this exclusive website that allowed them to stay in contact with other high schoolers lucky enough to have received an invite along with a slew of college students who apparently had been enjoying this privilege for some time. I remember first thinking: “Why did my older brother never mention this clearly hip new fad?” (Yes, I thought in the dorky terms of “hip” and “fad” back in high school). And immediately after that, “I definitely want to get invited to join.”
Sure enough, later that evening one of my tennis peers sent me an email, inviting me to join this illustrious “Facebook” by registering as a user within our private school network. My parents were immediately confused what I was wasting my time doing on the Internet now, given I already used AIM and email. I assured my parents that this was much more than AIM and email for it was an exclusive website for students-both high school and college.
Oh those good old days, where Facebook limited its users as such.
Still, my teachers at school immediately began warning all us students of the dangers that these online websites presented. “They hold onto the data posted on them for life. Do you really want actions, pictures, and comments to linger after you forever just for the interim delights of “staying connected” now?”
Well, yes. We trusted our privacy was remaining intact. Facebook has an assortment of privacy settings so you can limit just who gets to see your profile, so this would keep us all safe. Right?
As Facebook became increasingly popular, the creators saw an avenue to make an incredible profit and no longer required users to be connected to a school. People could register for Facebook merely by linking themselves to their town’s network. Eventually, people could identify themselves by their office network. Today, Facebook is essentially open to anyone who has an email account.
What began as an innocuous program to keep students connected slowly transformed into a platform available to all the public. This once safe space also began to occupy a more controversial position in my life.
Again teachers warned: “You’re boss will look at your Facebook and take your profile into consideration before hiring you. Be sure you limit the content on your profile to protect your image.” Then cognizant of the potential dangers of Facebook at the time I heard this warning I immediately heeded the advice and did my best to limit my profile so that only people I had previously confirmed were my “Facebook Friends” could access my information.
As time continues I become more and more torn about how to handle my use of this website. It surely keeps me connected to friends in a simple, yet, meaningful manner. It allows me to show my peers what is going on in my life and my feelings to a certain extent. Nevertheless, I dislike how commercial the website has become. Since 2007, every time I log onto Facebook I am bombarded with advertisements that overtime become creepily more and more specialized to my interests because the site inspects topics I discuss in my profile so as to later use me as a target for advertisers to send out their messages. This is great for the advertisers, for it allows them to truly reach their niche audience, but I cannot help feeling as if a bit of my privacy is getting invaded just so Facebook and these advertisers can ultimately make more money.
Facebook continually updates its site by instituting new capabilities without offering users the opportunity to approve these decisions. If you don’t like where Facebook is going, your only way of retaliating is to deactivate your profile, for there is no platform to give meaningful feedback to stop the changes the website implements. One of the latest of these decisions that leaves me incredibly concerned is Facebook’s increased linkage ability to other websites and to itself. In the latest form of Facebook that is slowly getting implemented on each user, Facebook overrides your preexisting Privacy settings as it creates a new function: providing your profile information to other websites that you browse on, allowing these websites to access the information on your profile. Facebook essentially tries to sell you as a able consumer to any of these sites as a valued product. And with 400 million plus users, Facebook has a lot to sell.
This latest change on top of Facebook’s 2009 declaration that Facebook as a company has the power and authority to “retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated” creates a troubling predicament. (Admittedly, Facebook later said they would revise their policy, yet, what keeps them from re-implementing this policy in the future?) How can we users trust a corporation that holds such a large body of information about ourselves especially when that organization already seems willing to manipulate its users into specialized markets for advertisers. What will prevent people from hacking on to our profiles to access and distribute our private information? Ultimately, this leads me to a greater question and concern: can the internet really be a private space? Are we all doomed for having believed in the facade of Privacy Settings?
At this point, I think I’d rather remain a bit in denial, because I cannot imagine a communication dynamic without Facebook. As Facebook institutes further changes, I may have to accept its transformation in purpose for its users (once connecting person to person to connecting person to eager advertiser, or worse, an individual set to destroy your reputation). Hopefully, we users will gain the power to better protect ourselves from the potential damage of using a social networking site like Facebook. I will certainly remain an active user dreaming this is possible.
Projections 