When the Most Personal Secrets Get Outed on Facebook ( 3 ) - Facebook executives say that they have added increasingly more privacy controls, because that encourages people to share. "It is all about making it easier to share with exactly who you want and never be surprised about who sees something," said Chris Cox, Facebook's vice president of product, in an interview in August 2011 as the site unveiled new privacy controls. Facebook declined to make Mr. Cox available for this article.
Still, privacy advocates say control loopholes remain where friends can disclose information about other users. Facebook users, for example, can't take down photos of them posted by others.
A greater concern, they say, is that many people don't know how to use Facebook's privacy controls. A survey conducted in the spring of 2011 for the Pew Research Center found that U.S. social-network users were becoming more active in controlling their online identities by taking steps like deleting comments posted by others. Still, about half reported some difficulty in managing privacy controls.
This past September, the National Football League pulled referee Brian Stropolo from a game between the New Orleans Saints and the Carolina Panthers after ESPN found a photo of Mr. Stropolo wearing a Saints jacket and cap that he had posted on Facebook.
It remains unclear whether the photo was intended to be public or private.
An NFL spokesman said, "I don't believe you will see him back on the field." The NFL declined to make Mr. Stropolo available.
Privacy researchers say that increasing privacy settings may actually produce what they call an "illusion of control" for social-network users. In a series of experiments in 2010, Carnegie Mellon University Associate Professor Alessandro Acquisti found that offering people more privacy settings generated "some form of overconfidence that, paradoxically, makes people overshare more," he says.
Allison Palmer, vice president of campaigns and programs at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, says her organization is helping Facebook to develop resources for gay users to help them understand how best to maintain safety and privacy on the site.
"Facebook is one of the few tech companies to make this a priority," she says.
Mr. Acosta, the choir president, says he should have been sensitive to the risk of online outings. His parents learned he was gay when, in high school, he sent an email saying so that accidentally landed in his father's in-box.
Today, he says, his parents accept his sexuality. So before creating his Facebook group, he didn't think about the likelihood of less-accepting parents on Facebook.
"I didn't put myself in that mind-set," he says. "I do take some responsibility."
Some young gay people do, in fact, choose Facebook as a forum for their official comings-out, when they change their Facebook settings to publicly say, "Interested In: Men" or "Interested In: Women." For many young Americans, sexuality can be confidential but no longer a shameful subject. Sites like Facebook give them an opportunity to claim their sexuality and find community.
For gays, social media "offers both resources and risks," says C.J. Pascoe, a Colorado College sociology professor who studies the role of new media in teen sexuality. "In a physical space, you can be in charge of the audiences around you. But in an online space, you have to be prepared for the reality that, at any given moment, they could converge without your control."
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has long posited that the capability to share information will change how we groom our identities. "The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly," he said in an interview for David Kirkpatrick's 2010 book, "The Facebook Effect." Facebook users have "one identity," he said.
Facebook declined to make Mr. Zuckerberg available.
Days after their outings, Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick met at the campus gender-and-sexuality center, which provides counseling. On a couch, they swapped tales. "I remember I was miserable and said, 'Facebook decided to tell my dad that I was gay,' " she says. "He looked at me and said, 'Oh really, you too?'"
Mr. McCormick's mother, Monica McCormick, meanwhile, was worried how the Facebook disclosure might affect her business selling insurance. "Every kid in this town now knows," she says. "I am sure that I have lost clients, but they are not going to tell you why. That is living in a small town."
Mr. McCormick and his father eventually talked about his sexuality over an awkward lunch at a burger joint and haven't discussed it much since. But Mr. McCormick feels more open and proud about his sexuality. He changed his Facebook profile to "Interested In: Men."
After Ms. Duncan's Sept. 8 outing, she went through long periods of not speaking with her father.
For a while, Ms. Duncan's mother moved into her daughter's apartment with her. "I wanted to be with her," says her mother, who is also named Bobbi. "This was something that I thought her father had crossed the line over, and I could not agree with him."
Speaking of Mr. Duncan, she says: "The big deal for him was that it was posted and that all his friends and all his family saw it."
The younger Ms. Duncan says she tried to build bridges with her father around the year-end holidays. But the arguments persisted.
"I finally realized I don't need this problem in my life anymore," she says. "I don't think he is evil, he is just incredibly misguided."
She stopped returning her dad's calls in May.
She and Mr. McCormick remain in the chorus. Mr. Acosta changed the Facebook group to "secret" and the chorus established online-privacy guidelines.
Today, Ms. Duncan has her first girlfriend. "I am in a really good place," she says, but wouldn't want anybody to have her experience. "I blame Facebook," she says. "It shouldn't be somebody else's choice what people see of me." ( The Wall Street Journal )
Blog : The Challenge
Post : When the Most Personal Secrets Get Outed on Facebook ( 3 )
No comments:
Post a Comment