Time to take a step backwards?

The idea behind signing up at Facebook is to keep connected to family members and friends, to share moments and thoughts. In the process, personal privacy is traded off for the convenience on offer. The social network answered a public need and, in doing so, demonstrated that young people do not value their privacy as much as their elders. The site’s consistent growth appears to refute any suggestion concern over the loss of privacy has become a major factor in people shying away from social media.

In a recent University of Vienna survey of 310 current and former Facebook users, 48.3 per cent of the respondents cited worries over privacy for having closed their accounts or considering it. (Another 13 per cent were just generally dissatisfied with the service, 13 lamented the shallow conversation and 6 per cent fretted about becoming addicted. Nearly half were mulling deleting their accounts and committing “virtual identity suicide”.

There are no surprises here, and nor is concern over privacy a new topic. Earlier this year the Pew Research Centre found that 61 per cent of Facebook users had taken breaks of several weeks or more from the service. About the same time, SocialBakers reported that Facebook had in recent months lost 9 million active monthly users in the US and 2 million in Britain.

These studies confirm that users are more cautious than ever about online networking and the loss of privacy in entails. They have reason to suspect the worst with revelations about the US and other governments mining the social media for private information. Government agencies in 74 countries filed 38,000 requests for user information from the networks just in the first half of this year. 

The suggestion that users have become paranoid about official snooping doesn’t hold up. The data mining of US National Security Agency alone is enough to counsel extra caution on the social networks and in personal email. In Thailand, government agencies have been caught harassing Facebook users for sharing or “liking” any comments deemed hostile to those in power. 

When people of all ages began using Facebook, a network designed for youngsters, teens quickly caught on that their parents could be tracking them and company employees kept an eye out for signs of management “surveillance”. These reasons by themselves were enough to drive some users away. More left because the content is, by its nature, essentially mundane. Many more saw how easily retailers were targeting them with Facebook’s admitted help. 

Facebook’s half-hearted response last week to the furore over ads was that, henceforth, there would be fewer of them and they would be less intrusive. It has yet to address the greater concern about the ads so cleverly matching each user’s interests that it’s obviously monitoring everything that’s posted. That is overstepping the bounds of privacy invasion. Facebook often appears to know more about users than their own family members do. 

Facebook has rebuilt the boundary between convenience and privacy and is threatening the limits of liberalism. Now it faces a dilemma. Can it maintain its market supremacy on the basis of advertising revenue and stop digging into users’ personal information? Failure to do so could cripple the social giant.