I recently read an online article [1] about how Facebook takes care of users' privacy.
I can't avoid taking a break to think some more about it.
Even with a big faith effort, believing in the intentions of a company which became so quickly famous, influential and most of all so economically "important", I don't really get how the words "Facebook" and "privacy" could meet togheter.
Facebook is pratically a buch of little blogs linked one another by a complex social relations net --even if only a part of these relations correspond to real life ones.
To provide to their users a way to express themselves, keeping up to date the friends about personal news, the system gives to everyone the required tools, the chance to insert almost anything: text, links, pictures and video --along with a complete set of personal informations (!).
The privacy issue is managed through a set of options which allow deciding who can access what.
It all seems to be so easy and harmless --and so people seems to consider it and use it -- but sadly this is not true.
Too often these little blogs become a way to spread around pieces of personal information, but sharing this in the web can have unespected and sometimes unpleasant results. And this is why privacy issue is so important.
What would you say finding out that a part the curriculums that you you're sending around to companies, searching for job, have been discarded after a quick search of information about you, via web [2]? Or if your school results would get compromised because of some snapshots found online about a wild party you've got with your school friends [3][4]?
Surely, neither a company nor a school should take care of the life of people outside of what's concerning the relations between them and these people. Whatever I do after my job time is not affair of my emploiers as well as friendship and live customs of a student after the school time are things that should concern family, not the school nor the college.
But all this can't avoid such things from happening. And they happen. In fact this objectionable habit seems to be silently spreading.
It's also true that this is not due only to unability of the emploiers or educators to contain themselves into their boundaries.
The ignorance and superficiality of many persons who use the internet do its job (sigh)..
(New words like "n00b" have been created right because there was the need to give a name to the "common computer user" who uses its computer with the same ignorance and passivity that he use for a remote control.)
However, disregarding the imprudence of the people who share online more or less personal info and the opportunism of who go search right for those info for whatever reason, I wonder what's the responsibility imputable to the social network themselves in creating this info soup. (I have such feeling that they set the fire on and putted over it the pot and that we're providing pieces of our live as ingredients.)
Having made new social aggregation systems to connect people over long distances in a new way means having added a new variable to the system and this has many consequences, sadly not just positive ones, and anyway hardly assessable in advance.
Also these social nets aren't managed "from the bottom", the community, which only uses it, but they are instead the main node for international companies' activities, which are hardly influenced by big economical issues, and thus cannot give nor grant a feeling of being affordable in their effort in taking care of users problems.
But at least, as users and/or observers, we can (and should) try to deeply analize those consequences.
So, for example:
- How are the information shared between the users handled?
- From who?
- Where they do go?
- Who has rights about them?
- what kind of problems could comes out of this and how to solve or avoid them?
- How to use such communication tools?
- Do they deserve trust?
- Is it possible to make anytime a step back?
Starting from the last question (trying) to give also a reply for all the others, the answer is... no. It's not possible to come back out of it.
Anyone who, either for interest or for job, used widely and carefully enough the web to get a general idea of how it does work, knows that anything which goes inside it, will never get out of it!
Once a piece of info of any kind entered into the internet system, any feeling of having a control on it is pure illusion. In fact sometimes trying to remove something do produces right the opposite effect (streisand effect [5]).
Try to ask yourself some questions..
Can you say WHERE the info that you share is PHISICALLY stored? I mean in what harddisk(s)? (And how many if they're more than one?)
Where is such disk placed? Under what jurisdiction? Do you have access to that disk?
What guarantees do you have that the options provided you to manage your data actually correspond to a real management of the "original"?
What's the real level of control you have on your info (and of the whole situation)?
Perhaps you never thought of it and they all rather seems to you just paranoid questions. But someone made some tests trying to understand something more about all this, and he discovered than by deleting an image uploaded to facebook using the provided tools, what's really deleted is the link between the picture and the page who shows it, NOT THE FILE itself, which instead IS ALWAYS AND ANYWAYS AVAILABLE (at least so far) ALSO OUTSIDE OF THE FACEBOOK WEBSITE simply by its URL.[6]
Duh!
By the way, the same concept of "original" used before doesn't really make sense when talking about digital data, because at any transmission of such data a perfect "copy" of them is generated and sent. It doesn't exists "the" file moved here and there or sent up and down through the phone lines!
When referring to the internet, for every person who display a web page, a clone of such page is created and stored in the PC, and it doesn't disappear once the page is closed in the browser.
The browser automatically preserve a certain amount of disk and memory space (named "cache"), used to store a copy of almost any information received, so to avoid to request many times the same things if it happens to reopen the same page.
These clones do remain inside the computer untill a predefined date/hour or untill they're manually removed (keeping in mind that even if they're going to be removed, they can often be restored, and anyway, even supposing that the browser is not going to keep a cache, it would be easy to capture a copy of the data when the software itself shows them).
And these are not the only copies that gets out of web data sharing: many others unavoidable ones need to be counted in, like for possible searchengines cache, internet archive or equivalent copies, hosting service backup copies, and/or possible copies created by anyone who accessed the info (who perhaps also send out a copy to someone else, starting an unstoppable chain of forwarding, especially when it's all about sensitive information, right the ones that people would like to be protected)...
Well, at this point you should have understand that containing the diffusion of shared info or thinking at keeping the control of it, is not feasible.
But that's not all..
Let's take for example the pictures (o the video): according to (still for example) the current italian law, it's mandatory to ask for permission to ssomeone BEFORE to publish a snapshot of him, except in case --generally speaking-- that he/she's a VIP or that's a question of right/duty of report (while it's ALWAYS forbidden in case of minors).
The only one acceptable alternative (still referring to the law) is a contained distribution, which means to share the information inside a limited and manageable group of persons, like in family. [7][8]
In the internet this is possible publishing the data in a password protected page, and Facebook seems to widely accomplish to such requirement, but we just saw that its pictures are ALWAYS available via their own URL, EVEN AFTER deletion (contrarily to what terms of service state.. woops! How comes? Where's gone all that spoken effort for the users rights?).
Let's not forgot also that every button or menu entry, the whole data management system that is, --not only for Facebook-- corrispond to specifically programmed actions, made every time in a different way: there are no standard ways.
It's generally about programming code (but could be also other, like server setup), result of human intelligence, and consequently subject to lacks.
And obviously we don't have the rights to access them to verify correctness and functionality, because of both copyright/patents issues and... "security" reasons (so they say).
So the only one way is... blind trust.
But how can we trust this? We've just seen that they don't even respect their own rules!
In any case it seems to me that the main leak still remain the contraddiction of thinking of being able to get a privacy protection system to live toghether with a social network: these nets are built right over the "sharing" of users' info.
(The same managers seems to hope that users will share anything with anyone, in the "face" of all these nice speaking of privacy!)
It's a common habit to upload snapshots or to link videos of the family or friends or parties and group activities, sometimes even with unknown persons. And all this without asking for permission to the involved subjects, as it'd be instead often good (and how actually SHOULD BE DONE, according with privacy laws, as already mentioned).
It happens in this way that tools (still to be verified) to protect "self" privacy are yes provided, but at the same time assumptions and tools to violate other's privacy are also provided!
How can an user, or rather anyone, even if not a Facebook or Myspace or any other social network user, being sure that no info nor snapshots about him/herself, even if only partially related, have been published? It's easy to say. It's impossible.
It must be said too, to be fair, that the Facebook terms of service shows a certain extent of engagement in establishing a dialogue with the users, but this doesn't actually means that requests are satisfied...
It seems to me that the system totally fail about privacy protection!
(And Canada seems to agree with me. [9])
They should use it as a slogan: "Knowing all of the people affairs is now much more easy, thanks to <name_of_the_Social_Network_on_duty>!"
(And if you're wondering... yes: there are also snapshots of me online, not authorized, even if luckily nothing that I have to worry about too much... so far at least. And anyway it's still possible that there are some more pics around, which I'm not aware of! AND THERE'S NOTHING I CAN DO! Think about it.)
y.
