The Facebook experience: what does privacy mean in the post-Snowden era?

Mark Zuckerberg’s recent meeting with investors indicates the extent to which the founder of Facebook’s ideas about privacy are changing. That said, privacy on the social networking site is to all intents and purposes non-existent: after all, it was created on a university campus, places where seclusion is rarely the norm; what’s more, the logic of Facebook is that the more stuff we share with more people, the more money it makes.

But in recent months, as the company has considered purchasing tools like Snapchat, and at the same time as Secret’s popularity has been growing, there have been some interesting developments. In February, Facebook bought WhatsApp, a supposedly private messaging service: users concerned about their security being breached have been told to hang in there while Facebook works on the issue.

Anonymous logins, the appearance of a small dinosaur that warns users if they seem to be oversharing, or the recent default privacy settings change for new accounts from “public” to “friends” are clear signs that Facebook’s approach to privacy is changing: from its beginnings, when the company never used the term privacy, or applied Vint Cerf’s argument that privacy was a “historical anomaly” that people were no longer interested in, to the current time, when a rethink on these questions seems to be underway.

On the one hand, research and surveys show that those arguments about a generation that didn’t care about privacy were wrong: young people do care about what they share, and they do think about privacy, although in certain situations they are prepared to accept a trade off. The rise of applications like Snapchat, described by Zuckerberg as a “super-interesting privacy phenomenon” a comment doubtless prompted by his interest in buying it at that moment, also revealed something else: an awareness that if Facebook can no longer offer users a reasonable degree of privacy when they share things, they will stop using it.

The importance of the issue was compounded when Randy Zuckerberg, Mark’s sister, publicly evidenced that she didn’t understand Facebook’s privacy policies, as well as by the creation of an online searchable digital database of all of Mark Zuckerberg’s public statements. In other words, it is beginning to dawn on the Facebook founder that privacy is a bigger question than he might initially have thought, and that managing this could become a major problem for the company. Whether he likes it or not, ideas about privacy are changing in the Facebook age.

One of the main drivers of this change is obviously what we have learned from Edward Snowden about our governments’ spying on us. Faced with a reality where any expectation of privacy has gone, most users have not resigned themselves to Big Brother—although there are still plenty of people out there who think that the threat of terrorism justifies any invasion of our privacy—, an instead have turned to increasingly sophisticated tools to protect themselves. The use of ad blockers and tracking control is growing fast thanks to services such as Abine, AdBlock, AdBlockPlus, Collusion, Disconnect, Ghostery, Privowny or PrivacyScore, tools that were once considered the domain of geeks, but that are now becoming widespread.

For the moment, Facebook’s privacy measures apply only to protecting users’ information from others on the platform. But equally important, but yet to be raised, is the question of protecting Facebook users’ data from the company itself through tools that share or archive information by coding them, codes that not even the company can break. Repeated episodes of default privacy settings changes, along with scandals regarding intrusive advertising, as well as erratic policies that always go in the same direction have led many people to simply assume that there is no such thing as privacy on Facebook.

At this late stage, and after all that has happened, changing the social network’s image so that at some point it might be seen as a platform that gives its users some control, warns them of possible mistakes, and in some way as a tool that respects privacy, may no longer be possible.

(En español, aquí)