Even some of Zuckerberg’s associates disagree with him. “Mark doesn’t believe that social and professional lives are distinct,” says Reid Hoffman, the early Facebook investor and creator of the business-only LinkedIn social network, which discourages inclusion of personal information. “That’s a classic college student view. One of the things you learn as you get older is that you have these different contexts.” Longtime Facebook programmer Charlie Cheever (now departed from the company) is another skeptic: “I feel Mark doesn’t believe in privacy that much, or at least believes in privacy as a stepping-stone. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong.” By “stepping-stone,” Cheever means Zuckerberg sees privacy as something Facebook should offer people until they get over their need for it.
But some theorists of business applaud Zuckerberg’s approach. John Hagel, fifty-nine, a top researcher and consultant at Deloitte Consulting and author of several bestselling books about the Internet and business, believes presenting what he calls “a holistic version of ourselves” is inevitable and probably beneficial. The reason, he says, is the accelerating pace of change in business and society. “If we don’t keep acquiring new knowledge by participating in broader networks of relationships, we’ll be out of work,” he explains. “But sustained relationships must be based on trust, and that’s harder if you’re only showing a part of yourself.”
It’s not that Zuckerberg believes in total disclosure. He wouldn’t reveal confidential goings-on at Facebook on his own profile. Hagel too has his limits. “If I’m going to criticize my daughters I won’t do it on Facebook,” he says. “On the other hand, it’s valuable for people to know I have two daughters because it creates more sense of who I am as a person.”
Some people thrive on the unbridled self-disclosure. Jeff Pulver, a New York tech entrepreneur and consummate networker both on and offline, does much of his business on Facebook and Twitter, using them to send messages and arrange meetings. But he also is his real self in such interactions, he insists. “I call it life 3.0,” he says, “living more and more of your life online and connecting in real ways. People who have their shields up and don’t make themselves vulnerable won’t ever understand why there’s all this excitement about Facebook and Twitter and social media.”
In 2007, London-based technology expert Leisa Reichelt coined the phrase “ambient intimacy” on her blog to describe the dynamics of Facebook and other new services that enable individuals to freely talk about themselves to groups of friends or followers. She defined it as “being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.” The phrase struck a nerve globally with students of social networks. A widely discussed 2008 article in the New York Times Magazine by Clive Thompson detailed his own experience with Facebook and Twitter. It explored the social implications of ambient intimacy and was an argument for its virtues. “The new awareness…brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business,” Thompson wrote, approvingly.
The reality is that nothing on Facebook is really confidential. The company’s own privacy policy is blunt on this score. Any of your personal data “may become publicly available,” it reads. “We cannot and do not guarantee that User Content you post on the Site will not be viewed by unauthorized persons.” To be fair, this language is intended primarily to inoculate Facebook against potential lawsuits. The company certainly tries hard to give you protections for what is meant to be confidential. But many people do not understand or take advantage of Facebook’s often-complicated controls for their own information. That frequently leads to misunderstandings and embarrassment.
Once people expose their real behavior on Facebook, when they do something rash or stupid it is more likely to become “publicly available.” A young U.S. employee of Anglo-Irish Bank asked his boss for Friday off to attend to an unexpected family matter. Then someone posted a photo on Facebook of him at a party that same evening holding a wand and wearing a tutu. Everyone in the office—including his boss—discovered the lie. A political candidate in Vancouver, Canada, withdrew from his race after a newspaper published a Facebook photo showing two people happily pulling on his underwear. Notoriously, Barack Obama’s speechwriter Jon Favreau was publicly embarrassed when a blog published a photo that showed him at a party with his hands on the breast of a life-size cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton. It had been posted on Facebook by one of his friends. And Facebook disclosure can do more than merely embarrass you. A 2009 poll of U.S. employers found that 35 percent of companies had rejected applicants because of information they found on social networks. The number one reason people weren’t hired: posting “provocative or inappropriate photographs or information.” Colleges too are increasingly searching Facebook and MySpace as they make admissions decisions.
Perhaps the Favreau incident was on President Obama’s mind when he spoke to a group of high school students in Virginia in September 2009. “I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook,” he said, “because in the YouTube age, whatever you do will be pulled up later somewhere in your life. And when you’re young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff.” Facebook membership is becoming common among younger and younger children—it is now commonly used by many eleven-year-olds and those even younger, despite Facebook rules that users must be thirteen.
You don’t have to be young to make mistakes there, however. Numerous Facebook incidents have exposed unseemly behavior by people in positions of responsibility. A guard at a Leicester, England, prison was fired after colleagues noticed he was friending prisoners. A Philadelphia court officer was suspended and reassigned after a juror in his courtroom reported he had asked her to be his Facebook friend. Jurors also have erred. Several verdicts in various parts of the United States have been challenged by convicted defendants after they learned that supposedly silenced jurors had posted remarks on Facebook while the trial was under way.
Even people whose very job is to keep secrets are flummoxed by Facebook’s inducement to transparency. After the United Kingdom announced in mid-2009 that Sir John Sawers would become the next head of its spy agency, the Secret Intelligence Service (formerly called MI6), the Daily Mail newspaper discovered a publicly accessible trove of family photos that had been posted by his wife on Facebook. They included images of holidays, family friends, and details that could reveal where Sawers lived and how he spent his time.
Facebook transparency can jar intimate relationships. Many still haven’t gotten used to seeing and knowing so much about their significant others. If your boyfriend shows up in photos with another girl, it may mean nothing, but who knows? Worse is when someone learns they are no longer a couple at all—by seeing a change in a Facebook profile. The outcome can even be tragic: a British man allegedly killed his wife, from whom he had recently separated, after he saw her relationship status on Facebook change from “married” to “single.”
Photos in particular can reveal, as they did for Sir Sawers, who you spend time with, what you do with them, and where you go. High school and college students essentially conduct their lives in the open on Facebook. They conduct one-to-one dialogues with their friends on their Facebook “wall” despite the fact that anyone else with access to that profile can see it. This information is generally visible to anyone in their school network.
A few dissenters in the young generation find the obsession with Facebook self-presentation unhealthy. Shaun Dolan, a twenty-five-year-old New York assistant in a media firm, has made a deliberate decision to stay off the service. “My generation is unbearably narcissistic,” he said in an email to me. “When I go out with my friends, there is always a camera present, for the singular goal of posting pictures on Facebook. It’s as if night didn’t happen unless there’s proof of it on Facebook. People painstakingly monitor their own Facebook page to see what pictures they get tagged in, or what picture would best represent them
to their friends.”
Some call such behavior exhibitionism, or, as my longtime Fortune colleague Brent Schlender puts it, a search for “digital fame.” On Facebook we follow the minutiae of our friends’ lives the same way millions follow Britney Spears in People magazine. Andy Warhol famously said that “everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes,” but on Facebook what’s limited is not how long you are famous but how widely. It may be only among a circle of friends or school-mates. The Internet theorist David Weinberger now posits that “on the Web, everybody is famous to 15 people.”
Many young people don’t seem to know when extreme self-exposure becomes reckless. A twenty-year-old employee of Petland Discounts in Akron, Ohio, posted a photo of herself on Facebook holding two rabbits she had just drowned. Animal rights activists were outraged and she was shortly arrested and charged with cruelty to animals. Teenagers routinely post photos showing themselves and others using drugs or drinking when they are not of legal age. At Amherst Regional High School in Amherst, Massachusetts, a student gathered up pictures that showed popular kids drinking and possibly using marijuana, then sent them en masse to the school principal and others in the community. At another high school, the principal went onto Facebook and suspended all the athletes he saw in photos of a party who were holding bottles of beer. (Those with red plastic cups were spared.)
Facebook interactions with teenagers are almost universally fraught for adults, because the two generations have such fundamentally different attitudes about what is proper personal disclosure. One San Francisco executive was friended by her partner’s teenage son. When he took a summer trip to Europe he headed to Amsterdam and excitedly told friends on Facebook all about his pot smoking. My friend was torn—should she tell her partner, or would that be betraying the trust given her by the teenager? A sixty-year-old in Virginia saw her nephew swearing furiously on his Facebook page, but knew that his extremely strict school could expel him for that. She confronted him about it herself rather than telling his parents.
Since most teenagers still won’t friend their parents, some families have instituted a rule that as a condition of having a computer and using Facebook the parents get access to their child’s profile. They are frequently distressed by what they find there.
How much Facebook should encourage users to reveal has been the subject of debate throughout the company’s history. “Our mission since day one has been to make society more open,” says marketer Dave Morin, a member of Zuckerberg’s inner circle. “That’s what it’s all about, right? We help people be more open across more contexts. I think they have to worry less all the time about being who they actually are.” But Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, thirty-nine, looks at it slightly differently. “Mark really does believe very much in transparency and the vision of an open society and open world, and so he wants to push people that way,” she says. “I think he also understands that the way to get there is to give people granular control and comfort. He hopes you’ll get more open, and he’s kind of happy to help you get there. So for him, it’s more of a means to an end. For me, I’m not as sure.” Sandberg, fourteen years Zuckerberg’s senior, thinks it’s fine if someone doesn’t want to make his or her life transparent.
Facebook does have a unique ability to help users control where information about themselves flows. But it only works because of Facebook’s rigid requirement that people use their real names. If you weren’t confident people on Facebook were who they said they were, you would not be able to selectively permit them to access your data by friending them. You can restrict or amplify the extent of their view into your information, as well as adjust how much information you see about them, by putting them into groups called Friend Lists. These groups—for work, family, college friends, or whomever—enable you to send information to one group and not to others. However, only about 25 percent of users actively use these controls, according to Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly. Many consider them maddeningly difficult to use.
Facebook at least potentially already has more ways for users to control their data than just about any other site on the Net. Longtime top company architect Adam D’Angelo says Facebook represents a “new model for information” because of these controls. “Every piece of information on Facebook is protected by restrictions that say who can see it,” he says. “Certain sets of people can see certain pieces of information.” D’Angelo is right to note that such “granular” controls are found almost nowhere else on the Net, partly because only Facebook has so much information about who is doing the looking.
In late 2009 Facebook renovated its privacy controls and made a major effort to explain to users how to put friends into groups and assign various levels of disclosure to information. However, in the course of requiring users to adjust their settings, the company set the default setting on new controls to “everyone.” Many users who were not paying attention found their information more exposed rather than less, despite this supposed “improvement” in privacy. The counterreaction was strong. A group of privacy organizations led by Marc Rotenberg and EPIC filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, asking for an investigation and penalties for Facebook. The complainants included important groups like the American Library Association and the Consumer Federation of America. Before the change Facebook executives had spoken enthusiastically of it, saying it was likely to reassure users about their data. Ironically, EPIC’s suit asserted quite the contrary: “Facebook’s changes to users’ privacy settings disclose personal information to the public that was previously restricted…These changes violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook’s own representations.” The company had still not learned how to anticipate and accommodate the concerns and attitudes of its users regarding privacy. They apparently were not yet ready for too much transparency.
Zuckerberg more or less lucked into giving Facebook’s users the control they do have. In the beginning it became apparent that users at Harvard shared so much about themselves because they knew that only other Harvard students—members of Facebook’s Harvard network—could see it. So as Facebook evolved, the concept of networks grew with it. All users were initially put into a network by default—for a university, a high school, a workplace, or a geography. For years I was in the Time Inc. network and also the New York one. You can see information about other people in your networks, and they can see yours unless you adjust your privacy preferences to prevent it. (I do, for both networks.) But nobody outside the network can see your information unless you explicitly permit them to. Now, in a key change, regional networks are being eliminated. That will dramatically reduce the number of people who can see most users’ data if they haven’t “friended” them.
For all the privacy challenges on Facebook, most people seem comfortable with how it works. In a September 2009 survey it was found to be the tenth-most-trusted company of any type in the United States in a survey of 6,500 consumers by research firm Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe, which verifies Internet sites. Facebook ranked ahead of Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
But the influence of Zuckerberg’s more extreme convictions remains apparent as you walk Facebook’s halls. Some there talk about a concept they call either “ultimate transparency” or “radical transparency.” Since the world is likely to become more and more open anyway, people might as well get used to it, the argument goes. Everything is going to be seen.
The place where your information is most obviously transparent is Facebook’s photos application. That’s where it is hardest to limit the disclosure of information about yourself. You have no control over whether someone posts a photo of you there. You do have the right to delete the “tag” on a photo that identifies you and causes that information to be disseminated to your friend list. However, generally by the time you delete one, news of the tag has already been distributed in Facebook’s News Feed. (Any user can also adjust Facebook’s privacy settings so they cannot be tagged at all.) Photos are visibl
e by default. Everyone on the entire service can see them unless you deliberately adjust your privacy controls, and most users don’t.
Many users over the years have wanted Facebook to remove objectionable photos of them taken by others. However, the company follows a firm policy that while the tag is in your control, the photo is not. It belongs to the photographer. Facebook has also, wrongly in my view, resisted letting users approve tags of themselves before they are affixed to a photograph and distributed to friends.
Proponents of radical transparency argue that while Facebook may make it easier for people to see photos of you, there are many other sites on the Internet where a photographer could also post those photos. So Facebook is not facilitating anything that might not happen anyway.
“Mark’s view is that Facebook had better not resist the trends of the world or else it’ll become obsolete,” says the soft-spoken but passionate Adam D’Angelo, who shares this view and with whom Zuckerberg has discussed such issues since they were at Exeter in 2001. “Information is moving faster,” he continues. “That’s just how the world is going to work in the future as a consequence of technology regardless of what Facebook does.” Even Sheryl Sandberg takes evident pride when she says, “You can’t be on Facebook without being your authentic self.”
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