Media Ethics: Issues and Cases 8th Edition by Philip Patterson, Lee Wilkins

Exercise 11

Facebook: Should You Opt Out or In?
LEE WILKINS
University of Missouri
For most college students, on most college campuses, Facebook has become the social networking site-a place to meet people, talk to friends, form interest groups outside of geographical constraints and beyond the prying eyes of parents and teachers. Many college students access Facebook multiple times daily.
In September of 2006, Facebook made changes that automatically alerted everyone in a user's network anytime any other member of that person's network updated anything. Users were flooded with minutia. Even more objectionable was that messages intended for one person, or one part of a network, were directed to everyone in a network (Stanard 2006). The furor was immediate and passionate:
If you don't want this information to be out there, don't put it on Facebook. How did the news feed work any differently than the real-world gossip chain?... Eh, maybe this will convince people that they shouldn't put their whole lives on the Internet.
It's not the fact that they can see it, it is the fact that it is "broadcast" that makes it bad. I don't care that people I know find out that I break up with a girl, but I don't want it to be sent RSS style to everyone I know.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized to Facebook users and relented on the policy change. In 2007, Facebook users protested again, this time over a feature called Beacon, which tracked user actions on dozens of outside Web sites and revealed information about users' actions and purchases to their Facebook friends. The Beacon feature was removed from Newsfeeds, and users now have opt-out control over whether their data are sent to third-party applications.
The protest of Beacon was significant because the tracking feature was similar to tracking tactics often employed by online advertising, though usually without user awareness. According to the Center for Democracy and Technology ("Privacy Implications of Online Advertising" 2008), a Harris Interactive/Alan F. Westin study found that "59% of respondents said they were not comfortable with online companies using their browsing behavior to tailor ads and content to their interests even when they were told that such advertising supports free services. A recent TRUSTe survey produced similar results. It is highly unlikely that these respondents understood that this type of ad targeting is already taking place online every day".
Because users are commonly unaware of this practice, they are unable to take action to protect their personal information if they wanted to. Although Web sites and advertisers sometimes offer opt-out options for users, few consumers "have been able to successfully navigate the confusing and complex opt-out process" (13). What all these discussions pointed out was that, once posted, Facebook owned the information about its users and was selling it for a variety of purposes. This ownership arrangement was spelled out in the terms and conditions on the site, but many of the sites almost 1 billion users didn't understand the ownership issue and its implications.
How confusing was thinking about privacy on Facebook? In 2009, the New York Times published a guide to Facebook privacy settings: users had to go through more than 100 different steps to alter their privacy profiles on the popular Web site. Facebook itself got the message. In the next year, it altered its software to make it much easier for users to change privacy settings. With two clicks, it was now possible to replicate what had taken more than 100 clicks a year earlier.
But, Facebook continued to push the privacy envelope. In 2011 the Web site adopted automatic facial recognition, making it easier-and even encouraging users-to tag new photos placed in the site by Facebook friends. Furthermore, the facial recognition feature was an opt-out option-users could say they wanted it only after the fact. Those who did not want it could opt out only after photos had been tagged.
That move proved controversial in Europe, where a group of privacy watchdogs, the Article 29 Data Protection Watch Party which has the power to punish firms that violate privacy, launched an investigation. That move was followed in Great Britain and Ireland. The Information Commissioner's Office of Britain is "speaking to Facebook" about the privacy aspects of the technology, said Greg Jones, a spokesperson for the group, telling reporters that he expected Facebook to be "upfront" with its consumers on how their personal information was being used.
In the United States, there continued to be what some considered unintended consequences. In 2009, one survey found that 45 percent of employers use Facebook and Twitter to screen job candidates. Two years later, a Microsoft survey found that the figure might be as high as 75 percent despite repeated and public cautions that using the social Web sites to screen job applicants raised real issues of discrimination by virtue of age, gender or ethnicity that might come with viewing wall posts. In 2011, the Library of Congress announced that it would archive and store all tweets since Twitter was founded in 2006-making the 144-character comments as long-lived as those in any book or in the Congressional Record.
But, the impact of Facebook and other devices, including mobile phones, was not merely informational: it was psychological and sometimes physical. One multinational study in Europe found that young people who were asked to withdraw from using their electronic devices for 24 hours began to show the physical, psychological and emotional signs of withdrawal normally associated with addiction.
And, in 2012, in response to a number of highly publicized cases of cyberbullying, including some that resulted in death or suicide of teenagers and young adults, Facebook augmented the power of its Family Safety Center and provided new tools to report cyberbullying. Meanwhile, just before Facebook's launch as a public company to offer stock to investors, General Motors withdrew its advertising from the site saying that Facebook ads had demonstrably little impact on sales. Some point to the General Motors decision as one of the factors of a lackluster launch of Facebook stock.
At the core of the debate over Facebook and many other, similar Web sites is the concept of privacy. Respond to the questions below based on your personal experience.
Should strategic communication professionals use the information about individual consumers provided on sites such as Facebook for purposes of target marketing? If the answer is yes, are there guidelines?