Facebook, privacy and the generational divide

Facebook’s management would like us to believe that younger generations don’t care about privacy

I’m on Facebook but you couldn’t say I love it. I want to stay in touch with friends and family. They’re on Facebook. I have to be on Facebook. But it does not make me a Facebook fan.

As a business, Facebook is in a very awkward situation, immensely popular and at the same time not highly regarded by its customers. Facebook’s always ambiguous and changing attitude towards privacy is probably the main reason why its customer satisfaction index is so low: the American Consumer Satisfaction Index – in its evaluation of the satisfaction of the users of social networking sites, ranked Facebook at the bottom of the list. Only Myspace did worse, by the slimmest of the margins. The user satisfaction index put Facebook in the same league as institutions as highly considered by their customers as the airlines, the cable companies and the IRS.

Example of Facebook face detection - source: Facebook

A few weeks ago, I was on Facebook, and suddenly saw the face of one of my neighbors popping up on the screen, with this question: “whose face is this ?”.

How did it happen? How did Facebook “connect” me with this neighbor, who is not even a “friend”? Facebook must have found a way to link us. Maybe we liked the same site, maybe we attended the same social event in the neighborhood, maybe somebody took a picture of the event, posted it, tagged my face but not his, and a Facebook algorithm decided to ask me to identify the rest of the people on the picture. Clever. But scary.

I read and heard multiple times that the younger generations are not worried about the loss of their privacy, that it’s OK for them to live in a transparent world. It has been one of Facebook’s most repetitive themes over the last few years. I tried to find statistics and studies showing that, as Facebook is suggesting, the desire for privacy is an old guy’s thing, and that there is a real generational gap in the attitudes towards privacy.

It seems that most of the data supporting this notion is coming from a few polls conducted in 2007. At that time Facebook was still a little known and relatively compartimented environment (founded in 2004, Facebook operated primarily in colleges and high schools before it opened to the public at large in Sept. 2006). The push to make everything public would come later, when the managers of Facebook would try to monetize their site. More recent studies, like this long analysis published on First Monday by two researchers at Northwestern University and Harvard’s Berkman Center, or like this report of the Pew Internet and American Life Project show that attitudes towards privacy may in fact be very different.

To determine whether the students using Facebook were concerned with their privacy, the researchers at Northwestern U and Harvard monitored whether and how often they were controlling and adjusting their privacy settings. Contrarily to what studies and polls published in 2007 seemed to demonstrate, even people in their late teens or early twenties are interested in controlling how the information they post is shared, and there is no generational gap when it comes to the attitude towards on line privacy. If you don’t want to read the whole study, Arstechnica has published a good summary.

The Pew Internet’s study focuses on how people manage their reputation on line. Contrarily to the legend, “young adults are more active than their parents when it comes to limiting the amount of personal information available about them on line, they change privacy settings, delete unwanted comments and remove their names from photos”.

To close the loop, you can read the comments about the Pew report that one of the two authors of the analysis published in First Monday, Danah Boyd, made on her own blog.

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