It's weird to be listening to the Zuckerberg testimony and feel like, in some twisted way, this is the culmination of the last 11 years of my academic research on Facebook, disclosure, data sharing practices, and privacy.
Also, if you're looking for people who have been writing about these topics extensively over the years, some suggestions from academia are @mzimmer, @zeynep, @pamwis, and @alicetiara, to name a couple. Also, the @pervade_team is focused on ethical implications of these topics.
And now I'm going to use this thread to share some of my thoughts on what I've learned over the last 11 years about social media, data, & privacy, as I couldn't help but write them down. /1
I started my academic career in 2007 writing my (pretty horrible) master's thesis on the connection between people's Facebook profiles and offline identities.
I don't suggest you actually read it but here it is: vitak.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/thesis… /2
I don't suggest you actually read it but here it is: vitak.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/thesis… /2
When I started my PhD (under @nicole_ellison), we did *a lot* of research on how people used FB. Although we focused largely on pro-social outcomes, it became clear to me that FB was radically changing interaction, and the norms around privacy and sharing went into flux. /3
This led me to begin studying context collapse, which refers to how FB treats your disclosures. Unlike offline, where your audience is generally known and you tailor disclosures to that audience, disclosures on social media are seen by much larger, often unknown audiences. /4
See @zephoria's and @alicetiara's work on networked publics to get a better sense of context collapse (e.g., journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…), or my 2012 article here: vitak.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/vitak-… /5
What I and others have found is this: 1) people don't like their tech to be complicated. FB's friend lists were *complicated* so people didn't use them. It was much easier to post things to everyone or, as @blurky says, use a "lowest common denominator" approach. /6
Second, granular privacy settings like those FB has are great but there's a fine line between giving people control and making them feel empowered vs. making them simply feel overwhelmed. We've found this to especially be the case with older users (eg vitak.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/vitak_…). /7
Third, PEOPLE DO NOT READ PRIVACY POLICIES. PERIOD. So putting them in plain language (rather than legalese) is not going to bring about a major change. Instead, something FB should be applauded for is their privacy nudges via the pop-ups or messages you may see about sharing. /8
Fourth, people are starting to realize that the extent to which data sharing happening, even if they're unsure *how.* In qualitative studies, I've heard many people reference how "creepy" it is seeing an ad for something on FB after doing a Google search for it. /9
Fifth, people in general don't place a ton a value on their data--especially data that isn't traditionally seen as sensitive (like SSN, credit card #). It's also hard for them to understand the power of aggregated data when they can't see how that process works. /10
We recently published research looking at the attitudes of people who use fitness trackers and found that this data is seen as having low value, even though it's now being used in court cases & companies are using trackers as healthcare incentives. See mobileprivacy.umd.edu/wp-content/upl… /11
All of this together highlights the highly contextual and nuanced nature of privacy and data in a networked world. I'd argue one of the most important takeaways from today's hearings are that many tech companies have taken naive approaches to the social & mobile services... /12
...that are now so ubiquitous. They focused on how to design better, more efficient tools to connect more people and make more money. I don't necessarily fault them for that, but now there are BILLIONS of people using them and they need to do better with our data. /13
I hope to see companies like Facebook bring more data ethicists, social scientists, STS (science & technology studies) and information scientists on their boards and teams to provide interdisciplinary perspectives on these very tough challenges. /14
Many of us have been calling for this shift for years, and several companies have added positions for these kinds of researchers. But they need more. More varied and diverse perspectives. More thoughtful discussions. More focus on balancing risks and benefits. /end
