Students, faculty react to Facebook changing key privacy features

Public or private? Soon Facebook users will have the option of sharing certain parts of their profiles with non-members.

On June 24, Facebook announced its highly anticipated, hotly debated and, to some, inevitable shift from private to public profile content.

The shift means users will have the option of making status messages, photos and videos visible to all Internet users – Facebook members and non-members – adding to the availability of personal information that keeps social media sites such as Twitter and MySpace up and running.

This new development will affect the Publisher privacy feature on Facebook. The beta version is currently available only to members who had set their profile privacy setting to “Everyone.”

According to The Facebook Blog, the site hopes to expand the new privacy option to all members eventually.

As the new privacy feature becomes available, Facebook users will choose between three options. The first is members can make their entire profile open to everyone, including non-members.

The second is choosing to make only certain information available to the public, like a particular photo, wall post or status update.

The third option is for those uninterested in making information viewable to everyone. Users will still have the option to make their entire profile private and viewable only by their Facebook friends.

Facebook’s executive decision has IU students and faculty divided about issues of privacy and protection of user information. IU telecommunications professor Mark Deuze said the new change will force users to reconsider what information they choose to share.

“Everyone knows that just about anything you put online is public in some fashion,” he said. “Knowing this, people will redact their (digital) personas. It’s like going on a date – you’ll want to put on your best face at all times.”

IU law professor Fred Cate argued another side.

Cate said he believed the majority of youth online are increasingly comfortable with what they share and didn’t expect much of a backlash.

IU journalism professor Anthony Fargo shared an opinion in agreement with Cate’s.
Fargo said from a legal standpoint, Facebook is going to do exactly what it wants to do, as long as people receive advance notification of drastic changes.

“People make the mistake of having a reasonable expectation of privacy,” he said.
“They fail to realize just by accepting a friend request, you’re already knocking down a wall.”

Cate proposed that the general misunderstanding of expecting privacy in contrast with the reality that everything is public should be apologized for.

“It’s too bad,” he said. “I feel like social media should specify, you know. If you’re not President Obama with 25 encryption passwords on a Blackberry, then you’re not safe.”

Cate said it is important to recognize whenever college students post their drunken spring break pictures, Facebook owns them immediately.

Perhaps the more extreme case is when a user is involved in a crime, the government
doesn’t have to go to court. It can go directly to Facebook and demand information.

“With the innovation of Twitter, you have people who are less concerned with privacy and have their privacy rights sort of fluffed away,” Cate said. “Someone can be standing in hot water and it be gradually turned up to boiling until they realize what is happening to them.”

For students such as junior Adam Dicken, Facebook’s new changes affect him less, though he admits that Facebook’s changes for the sake of profit and risking people’s false sense of trust in privacy is “annoying.”

Luckily for him, he said he “isn’t a big Facebook user anyway” and he “rarely posts anything.”

Graduate student Emily Pratt said she feels uncomfortable about the developments.
“I like to make my posts and pictures private,” she said. “I don’t think that it is fair that employers or anyone random should have access to what I think is private.”

Senior Adam Davis said he felt a sense of self-control would come over Facebook users and they’d be forced to differentiate between what is “appropriate” and “inappropriate.”

Deuze weighed the pros and cons of forced self-control.

He said he found it scary that people have to resort to half-truths because of fear their privacy isn’t being protected.

“You don’t get a sense of who people really are,” he said. “Of course, when you open your house to everyone, there may be a burglary now and then. But what about people who want to be radical and political? They can’t because it seems inappropriate.”