New Media & Community - g42

The advent of online social networking sites has provided benefits to society, yet these sites also present dangers that could potentially harm unwitting users. Social networking sites spur users to reveal information about themselves, creating profiles of facts about users’ interests, hobbies, friends and contact information. The information on these sites can foster development and maintenance of social ties due to the ability that they give users to connect with others based on commonalities, and they allow people to keep up with each others’ lives and provide an easy means of contact. However, personal information that users publish on these sites raises great privacy concerns, as the information could be used by predators to stalk individuals or steal their identities. Ellison et al’s article discusses both of these issues during their investigation into the role of Facebook in students’ lives. These authors found that Facebook was primarily used to maintain and potentially strengthen existing social ties created offline, which then migrated online. They discovered that one of the major uses of Facebook was to keep in touch with old friends and to maintain or deepen ties that were fostered by an offline connection, like shared class or proximity. These findings contrast with the relationships among users of earlier virtual communities, such as those described by Rheingold, in which bonds between members were first created online and then moved offline after a connection had been established. Similarly, the students used Facebook much less for meeting new people than for maintaining existing ties, which also goes against many of the assertions of authors who wrote about uses of the internet earlier in its history, like Rheingold and Singer, who both focused upon the internet and virtual communities’ ability to connect previously unacquainted, geographically dispersed people based on shared interest. In contrast, Facebook use, according to Ellison et al, is more about maintenance of existing social ties and is much more geographically-based, as members of students’ primary network are those who attend their same university. These authors also discuss the concept of social capital, as notably discussed by Putnam, finding strong connections between Facebook intensity and bridging, bonding, and high school social capital. High school social capital, an invention of the researchers, was particularly interesting in that Facebook was shown to maintain this form of social capital, as the site allowed users to sustain weak ties among old high school friends, providing low-effort ways to keep up with old acquaintances. However, one key limitation to this study is that causality between Facebook use and the maintenance of social capital cannot be proven due to the cross-sectional nature of the study, providing a bias to these results. Similarly, this study only surveyed the Facebook users of one school, Michigan State University, which presents a bias in that the study is not generalizable to other student populations. Similarly, 91% of these students were from Michigan, providing another source of bias, as residents of Michigan, or perhaps from the Midwest in general, may differ in social capital and in their use of Facebook from students from other states or regions of the country.

Verini also examines social ties and online social networking sites in his description of MySpace. However, in contrast with the findings of Ellison et al, Verini states that many MySpace users form new relationships online, and often only know these new acquaintances online. However, some users, such as Jeremy Jackson, do continue these new online relationship offline, meeting in person later and, in Jeremy’s case, even pursuing sexual relationships with them, utilizing MySpace as a dating site. Verini’s portrayal of social networking sites also differs from Gross and Acquisti’s, in that Verini describes the tendency of MySpace users to create falsified online personas, often creating fictitious alter egos or pretending to be someone famous. In comparison, only 8% of Facebook users used fake names in their profiles. This discussion illuminates a limitation of Verini’s article, as he rarely utilizes empirical data to back up his assertions. Verini does not attempt to discern the percentage of fictitious MySpace profiles, he instead merely states that they exist. His article, though admittedly published in Vanity Fair not a scholarly journal, would be strengthened if he employed more quantitative evidence to support his claims. Verini also discusses interest and affiliation-based groups that are prevalent on MySpace, which somewhat connects it to the common interest groups found in earlier virtual communities, such as WELL, which Rheingold described. The article also brings up some privacy issues, such as the accessibility of personal information on MySpace and about NewsCorp’s potential uses of MySpace profiles as a source of market research, but privacy concerns have a more tangential role in this article.

Ellison et al also examine the issue of privacy in relation to Facebook, stating that privacy advocates are wary that students form a false sense of security due to the association of Facebook as a “students only” space, which spurs students to provide personal information that could lead to stalking or identity theft. These concerns are echoed in Gross and Acquisti’s paper, which delves into the privacy concerns of online social networks. Gross and Acquisti discuss the potential for stalking created by Facebook categories, which allows students to list their residence and class schedule, giving predators information about students’ whereabouts. New features added to Facebook since this article was published, mainly the Status feature, could allow for further stalking, as many students now update their status to reveal their where they are or what they are doing at the current moment. The authors also identify less commonly acknowledged risks for attack, such as Re-identification and building a digital dossier. This description of Re-identification is particularly worrisome to me, because I, like presumably many other people, was unaware that predators could combine seemingly innocuous information like birth date, hometown, residence and phone number to estimate social security numbers and commit identity theft. Similarly, their assertion that 30% of users were found to accept an unknown friend request, thus exposing their profiles to unknown others, is also troubling, as many people do this without consideration of the potential consequences. Gross and Acquisti’s findings about the frequency that students change default privacy settings is also concerning, in that the majority of students are lulled into a sense of privacy protection through Facebook’s stipulation that only friends or those in your school (and now city) can view your profile and are thus unconcerned with changing these settings. However, since these findings were only based off of research on students from Carnegie Mellon University, the low percentage of those who alter privacy settings may not be accurate for all populations on Facebook, as members of different schools may be more aware than others of the potential problems with Facebook privacy, presenting a source of bias in these results. At Penn, for instance, students are repeatedly educated that we should not make our personal information available to all, especially during the recruiting process in which employers may judge candidates based on their online information, which has spurred many students to restrict access to their profiles or remove information. This employer viewing of candidates’ online information is further elaborated in Marks’ article. Like Ellison et al, Gross and Acquisti also discuss the possibility of social networking sites to allow students to maintain weak ties easily and cheaply through the technology. This allows for greater networks of weak ties in online networks as opposed to offline social networks, as the threshold to qualify as a friend on someone’s online network is low.

Marks’ article about the Pentagon and social networking sites also brings up alarming privacy concerns of which most users are probably unaware. Marks discusses a linkage of information somewhat similar to that of Gross and Acquisti’s re-identification concept, in that the Pentagon could soon use advances in technology to combine data from social network sites with other personal information such as retail, banking and property records to create comprehensive profiles of users. This is similar to the re-identification concept, in which Gross and Acquisti indicate the potential for linkage between social network site information and medical information or voter registration information. Yet Marks’ linkage differs from re-identification in that re-identification only deals with the linkage of information without explicit identifiers to data with explicit identifiers. The article also asserts that social networking site information could be combined with phone logs, purchases or where people go, obtained from cell phone records. Though the article does present a plethora of ideas about how the government could breach privacy, a limitation of the article is that many of its statements appear to be mostly speculative, as such technologies that would enable information combination are not yet available, so Marks cannot truly be certain that his hypotheses could really occur in coming years. He also does not provide much empirical support for his statements, such as where he discerned these possible privacy breaches from and what data he has to support his theories.