Managing the Digital Shadow

Privacy Issues Forum: Privacy is Your Business

Wellington: 27 August 2008

The practice of social networking: sharing personal

details online

Paper presented by

Barbara Craig

Social networking• Over 60% of New

Zealanders under 30 visit such sites at least weekly (World Internet Project 2007)

• Broadband access at home is the biggest enabler - allows upload of photos, streaming of music and video

• Bebo, Facebook and MySpace the most popular in NZ

• 3 features

1. Profiles - generated with text, images, video, audio, links, quizzes

2. Friends lists

3. The Wall - display of comments, gifts

The ‘third’ space

“When people take media into their own hands, the results can be wonderfully creative; they can also be bad news for all involved.” Jenkins, Henry. (2006).

Online profiles present aspects of identity for “Friends’ to view and comment on

Moral panic (media coverage)• Marketing/CIA conspiracy• predators• BullyingPanicking parents (want filters,

want to access kids’ profiles (shocked father and drug quiz)

• Only 1/4 NZ parents ever go to a SNSs but 3/4 of their children do

• Twice as many parents as children say they have rules for using SNS

Discourses of education and protection

Facebook

“I spend most of my waking life n Facebook, sad as it may seem, I admit I proudly! Most of my lecture content is stuck on blackboard…..so why not get the university to shut blackboard and move everything to Facebook. A more acceptable reason to waste ur life away on this new age communication tool!!!! Hahahahahahahah”

Sewyn, 2007

Creating a profileUser must enable the privacy controls

Facebook gathers information

“by positing Member content to any part of the Web site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt and distribute such information and content………” Facebook terms of use

Teens’ digital shadow• Of those teens with an active current profile, 59% set their

profile to private - this prevents parents or others from lurking but means that peers can only communicate with them when invited to be a Friend

• Friends are public displays of connections - identity markers of the individual - people judge others based on their associations- teens are often free with whom they are willing to add as Friends, anyone who looks interesting

• Profiles present the side of themselves that they believe will be considered “cool” by their friends (an imagined audience)- Bebo booze-up story with lurid description of a teenage party turned out to be a fantasy(July,2008)

• Terminology and jargon are markers of identity - digital natives help with online crime

Teens, Privacy & Online Social Networks (MySpace 2007)

82% first name 29% last name

61% city or town

49% school name29% email address

29% video link

40% stream audio, display IM screen name and link to blog

Teens and Privacy (MySpace 2007)

82% private messages

79% photos of themselves

66% friends’ photos84% post message

on wall

76% post messages to a friend’s blog

33% poke, give gifts

Facebook applications are a large

part of their appeal

to young people

No effective user control over data released to the application

Consent may reveal information about friends as well

Mediated publics • Persistence - what you say

through photos and text about yourself at 15 is still accessible at 30

• Searchability - parents, teachers can find you hanging out with your friends

• Replicability - you can copy a conversation from one place and paste it into another - hard to know if it has been doctored

• Invisible audiences - lurkers are invisible, different to encountering strangers in public unmediated life

danah boyd, 2007

Participatory Surveillance

• Social and playful, not snooping

• Mutual (active) revealing of your personal life to build subjectivity, make sense of life

• Personal information people share represent a line of communication that neither has to be told, nor has to be asked for -part of the socialising in mediated publics.

• Awareness of threats should not blur study of online networking

Albrechtslund, 2008

Computers in Homes Project (2008) -Bebo-digital divide -access at home when school/library blocked:Focus groups,10 parent-child pairs -young kids•Non-user households (low income, lack computer, lack know-how to use it 16% New Zealanders) dialup, one computer in lounge, filter•Mothers: ‘stranger danger,’ resp. as account holder (YouTube, TradeMe), deleted content-where does it go? Family and friends messages and photos•Privacy awareness of kids - no personal details, give out only face-to-face, kids help parents “Mum had her real name first” •Peers and older siblings helped create profiles - not sure what privacy settings used•Younger kids more certain that they cannot be identified from the information that they put up on their profile-’ heaps of photos but none by myself’•Fabricating information - false identity, untrue stories (log on to friends/cousins’ accounts, steal hearts, put up abuse, play jokes, trying to remove abuse) online/offline”I have big friends,noone abuses my page”•Mirror profiles, one for private, one for public•Bebo checks every profile by hand -”someone deleted my page!” - mother didn’t know daughter had Bebo profile, used library for access as banned at home.•One girl has 700 “Friends’

Scholarship References• Albrechtslund, Anders (2008). “Online Social Networking as

Participatory Surveillance.” First Monday,Volume 13 Number 3 (March).

• Barnes, Susan B (2006). “A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States.” First Monday, volume 11, number 9 (September).

• boyd,dana (2007). Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What? Knowledge Tree 13 (May).

• boyd, dana (2007). “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” McArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning - Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

• Selwyn,Neil (2007). “Screw Blackboard…do it on Facebook!; an investigation into students’ educational use of Facebook. Poke 1.0-Facebook social research symposium, University of London, 15 November.

References -research reports• Bell, Allan et al World Internet Project New

Zealand: the Internet in New Zealand Final Report 2007. AUT.

• Lenhart, Amanda &Mary Madden Teens, Privacy and Online Networks:How Teens Mange their online identities and personal information in the age of MySpace. Pew Internet Project, April 18, 2007.

• Media and Communications in Australian Families Australia Communications and Media Authority 2007.

• Ofcom (Office of Communications UK). Social Networking:quantitative and qualitative research reports into attitudes, behaviours and use. 2 April, 2008. Retrieved at www.ofcom.org.uk