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Spying in the Social Network
-- By VanessaWheeler - 16 Oct 2012
One recurrent theme in our class discussions has been musing over the shadowing spying function of the most popular social tools, notably google and facebook, which the vast majority of us use on a regular basis. The biggest question—why would we willingly and happily facilitate the wholesale surveillance, collection, and selling for profit of our personal information, preferences, and connections—has been touched on several times, without any particularly satisfying answers. Perhaps because we don’t know just how spied on we are? This is a possibility; however, it seems a weak explanation when our reaction, even when told of the extent of the spying, is to continue to participate in the process. Could it be because we are now all so linked into the facebook social network that we need it in order to stay in touch with our contacts? This is also unlikely in the age of cell phones, when we can contact anyone we truly care about at the push of a button (and let’s face it, if you don’t have and haven’t gotten the contact information of one of your facebook friend’s yet, they probably aren’t too essential to your daily life). So why do we continue to post our personal information, our photos, our relationships, and our preferences on facebook at all when we know that the moment that information hits our timeline, we completely lose control of it? I have a theory: it’s because as much as we don’t like the idea of facebook execs, advertising specialists, and governmental agencies monitoring our data, we like even less the idea of giving up our own newfound ability to spy on those that matter to us.
For all the speculation on the spying that is conducted by third parties, I think facebook’s greatest social function is in allowing ordinary people to spy on each other. With the click of a mouse, we can see what our best friends have been up to (and whether or not they have been inviting you to their social functions), who has been friending our significant others and posting on their walls, whether or not that new person you’re interested in is straight or gay, single or in a relationship. Parents can peruse their children’s photos, searching for all the information left out of conversations, peers can keep tabs on what their friends and intimates have been up to, and with the unfortunate and incautious, employers can even do a little background research on prospective new hires. Sure, it is possible to limit other people’s access to sections of your wall, but often it seems like too much of a hassle to specifically tailor your facebook to allow or prevent each person properly, and many of us probably aren’t as careful in that as we’d want to be anyway.
Facebook allows us with an easier insight into the people that concern us than any other social tool in history. My guess as to why we’re willing to accept the admittedly disturbing downside of potential spying by unseen commercial or governmental parties is that doing so allows us to act as spies ourselves. We consider the possibility that anyone would want to spy on us minimal—we haven’t done anything worth spying on and don’t really plan to anytime soon, so no one’s going to care—and our own desire to spy on those we actually know is immediate and easily satisfied.
In fact, there is likely a hugely profitable untapped market created by facebook: the selling of a person’s information and social networking activity to their significant other. Just as facebook can compile data on what a person has been looking at and how long to sell to advertisers, it could almost certainly just as profitably sell such information to an individual’s significant other. After all, I would be willing to bet that there is any number of husbands or wives who, if they could do so secretly, would be quite eager to know whose pages their significant other had been looking at, how frequently and for how long. I would also be willing to bet that any number of parents would be interested in having a list of their children’s friends or knowing what kind of pages they’ve been looking at. Facebook could easily do this; we willingly gave them our information, even when they smirkingly told us that they would take the rights to it. Yet, they won’t. Such a business would in the short-term likely be extremely profitable for facebook, but in the long-term, should it become well-known what was happening, would also probably be the end of facebook.
While the average person almost certainly takes an interest in being able to spy on their loved ones and would almost certainly (though guiltily) take that spying a little farther if they could, they would also almost certainly get rid of their facebook at long last if it became apparent their loved ones could do the same. It seems apparent that we all value the ability to keep track of the people in our lives to some degree and more than we do our ability to completely protect our own privacy from unknown forces. Yet, I would guess that our curiosity as to others has its own shadow function: a desire to hide certain things, especially our own spying, from anyone who actually knows us or would have some personal stake in what we did.
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