The Faces of Facebook

Some psychologists say that the need for acceptance is a basic human desire. Acceptance is the feeling of being valued, appreciated and regretted if you are gone, the belief that your life has meaning and purpose to someone else. Each of us is, after all, only a small speck in a sea of humanity. Some people make efforts to become valuable. Others make efforts to trying to pretend they are valuable. But in the end, everyone longs for some kind of community worth. Indeed, a Wired article suggested that the need for acceptance was a significant driving factor behind the concept of extreme programming ("The New X-Men", Wired, September 2003).

I used to work with a co-worker who would come in hung over on Monday mornings. He told me he hated drinking. I asked him why, then, did he drink so much to give himself a miserable hangover. He answered that he did it because all his friends did it. All his friends drank alcohol and smoked cigarettes so he had to damage his lungs and brain cells, too, if he wanted to keep them as friends.

People sometimes do stupid, damaging or even suicidal things to be accepted, and sometimes the risk of not being accepted by their friends or company or family leads them to abandon hope of looking for a better situation. Peer pressure affects more than just teens

The latest trend on the Internet is social networking websites. Social networking is hardly new on the network: chat programs, email, web forums and discussion boards, chat rooms, even online massive multiplayer games are all forms of connecting with peers. But these new websites provide a convenient front-end so that anyone can use these tools from one place.

During the holiday reruns of TVO's "The Agenda" program, one of the discussion topics was the value and future of "Facebook", the fastest growing social networking website. There was lots of talk about branding, advertising revenue, and connecting to high school friends. Indeed, it seems the main uses of sites like MySpace and FaceBook are students who don't want to lose track of their friends when they leave for university or beyond. But the tools to do this, and to do it with more privacy, have been on the Internet for years.

Some people advocate an aggressive approach to social networking. By embracing these technologies, you get control of Internet real estate and, therefore, of control of your personal information and prevent an enemy from planting false or misleading stories about you. This approach was suggested by a Global and Mail Article (Globe and Mail article). That still means you have to watch what you reveal. Employers, for example, can find out information about you that they aren't legally allowed to ask for in an job interview, and you could be rejected for a position without ever knowing why or being allowed to defend yourself against false allegations.

One important privacy study never mentioned on the TVO program was recently published in "Communications of the ACM". A social phishing experiment conducted at Indiana Univeristy involved a computer program that scanned Facebook to gather information about students, including their social networks, and sending them fake emails in an effort to mislead them into thinking their friends (or friends of their friends) were contacting them. Over 70% of the students fell victim to the study, leading to protests that they privacy had been compromised or their accounts had been hacked by a virus. In fact, the study only used the information that the students made public on Facebook. ("Social Phishing", Communications of the ACM, October 2007, pg. 94-100) While the pundits on "The Agenda" talked about Facebook risks for targeting advertising, this study talked about the more serious issues of targeted spam and targeted computer crime.

The study also concluded that most university students have no understanding of the dangers of posting their personal information on the Internet, even on a website with privacy safeguards. It may be that the young demographic of social networking sites think they have nothing to lose except their high school friends, but they may change their minds when someone impersonates them, defrauds them or bankrupts them by taking out a second mortgage on their home using information they made public on a social networking site five or ten years earlier.

Our personal information and privacy are a kind of currency. When you give them away, you give their value to others. It's important not to give them away too freely to gain social acceptance.

January 29, 2008