{"id":1852,"date":"2011-04-07T12:22:19","date_gmt":"2011-04-07T16:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=1852"},"modified":"2012-03-12T18:21:25","modified_gmt":"2012-03-12T22:21:25","slug":"ttw2011-panel-spotlight-all-ur-informations-iz-belongs-to-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2011\/04\/07\/ttw2011-panel-spotlight-all-ur-informations-iz-belongs-to-facebook\/","title":{"rendered":"TtW2011 Spotlight: all ur informations iz belongs to facebook"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"
Presider: Tyler Crabb<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Habermas argues that a healthy public sphere can only grow from a relatively autonomous private sphere.\u00a0 The maintenance and development of this public sphere is of prime importance to the health of an open society, but this era may be passing.\u00a0 The development of online social networks challenges the integrity and usefulness of a distinction between the public and private spheres.\u00a0 Perhaps this distinction is imploding, with future civic\u00a0 and commercial life simultaneously public and private, populated by cyborg citizens.\u00a0 The private sphere is now public in many important ways.<\/p>\n

Analysis of Facebook affords the opportunity to negotiate the contours of this historic transition, the opportunity to find empirical evidence and conceptual nuance to develop much needed social theory.\u00a0 This panel will explore transformations in personhood, privacy, property, justice, capital, commerce and other foundational issues; issues which are of obvious importance beyond Facebook’s 500,000,000 users.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Anthony Hoffmann (@anthonyhoffmann), “Me, not mine: Facebook, ontic informational beings, and the problem with information as property”<\/strong>
\nThe concept of information property is central to Facebook\u2019s overall philosophy of information. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly insisted that, on Facebook, \u201cpeople own their information and control who [sic] they share it with\u201d (Zuckerberg, 2009, para. 2), a sentiment that is explicitly codified in the site\u2019s governing documents (Facebook, 2009). However, the concept of personal information as property is not uncontroversial. Legal scholars have pointed out the difficulties with reducing subjects to informational objects (Cohen, 2000), as well as the problems with developing privacy protections based on property law (Litman, 2000). In this paper, the author argues that the concept of personal information as property is not only legally difficult, but philosophically problematic as well. By examining the nature and attributes of personal information developed within the context of social networking sites like Facebook, the author develops a conceptual definition of information property that can be compared against three Western philosophical conceptions of property\u2014Locke\u2019s natural law and its libertarian descendants, utilitarianism, and Hegelian personality-based theories. In the process, it becomes clear that certain attributes of personal information (for example, the lossless nature of information in general, as well as the constitutive nature of personal information) resist easy philosophical categorization as property according to these theories. Instead, the author suggests that the Humean declaration of private property as unnatural (i.e., governed by moral norms and social convention rather than natural law) points the discussion in a different direction. For Hume (and, later, for Rawls) the concept of private property is constrained by a given society\u2019s conception of justice. Therefore, we must first establish a framework for informational justice before we can begin to address the relationship between Facebook users and their information (and, in turn, develop a theory of property that properly reflects the nature and attributes of personal information). Last, echoing the legal problems with reducing subjects to informational objects, the author draws from work in the area of information ethics to demonstrate how Facebook users may be positioned as ontic informational beings in-and-of-themselves (Floridi, 2008), and are not necessarily reducible to the kind of quantifiable information objects that may be considered property. As a result, the author demonstrates that the last step\u2014from a framework of information justice to a theory of information property\u2014is unnecessary and that users, as informational beings, ought to be considered simply within a framework of justice and human rights, and not within one of property and ownership.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Stephen Lilley, “Facebook Members\u2019 Complicity with Commercial Transparency”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Introduction<\/em><\/p>\n

Facebook has over 500 million members (22% of all Internet users) who spend over 500 billion minutes a month on the site each sharing roughly 70 pieces of content a month (Rosen, 2010). With these staggering numbers it is not surprising that Facebook has become a rich venue for advertisers.\u00a0\u00a0 Critics charge that advertising revenue is generated by exploiting social actors\u2019 proclivity to form and maintain social ties.\u00a0 Facebook counterclaims that we as a society are loosening our standards around privacy and becoming more transparent in our lives as we get used to sharing information about ourselves. Mark Zuckerberg claims that this is the greatest transformation in our generation (The Economist 1\/30\/2010).\u00a0 Further, he would have us believe that the social actors in this revolution willingly expose themselves and their Facebook friends to commercialization.\u00a0 Is that the case?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Research Study<\/em><\/p>\n

We pose the following research questions: To what extent are Facebook members attentive to commercial data sharing policies?\u00a0 Do they favor such policies and the social ideal of transparency?\u00a0 We conducted our survey in December, 2010 on the campus of a private university in New England.\u00a0 Our purposive sampling of undergraduates yielded 372 students, of which 349 (94% of the sample) had a Facebook account.\u00a0 On average members had an account for four years and used Facebook six days a week, three hours per day.\u00a0 Respondents were asked to self-report on 1) the importance of Facebook to their social activities, 2) the level of their consumer activity on Facebook, 3) their knowledge of Facebook advertiser data sharing practices and their attitude toward such, 4) their use of sharing restrictions and the groups targeted, and 5) their assessment of transparency benefits, reputation risks, and consumer risks.
\nFindings<\/em><\/p>\n

In general, members were disinterested and inattentive to Facebook\u2019s consumer\/advertising features.\u00a0 Respondents were much more likely to indicate that Facebook is \u201cvery important\u201d or \u201cabsolutely crucial\u201d to sustaining friendships (56%) than it is for exposure to good things to buy (10%).\u00a0\u00a0 Three Facebook provisions for sharing profile information with advertisers were described in the questionnaire and approximately one half of the sample admitted not knowing about them.\u00a0\u00a0 Seventy-two percent of Facebook users have not controlled which of their information is made available to companies that host applications, games, etc., when friends use them.\u00a0\u00a0 Of the twelve sharing restrictions listed on the questionnaire, respondents reported employing few restrictions, with twice as many utilized to target friends (average of 2.4 restrictions) than for advertisers\/marketers (1.1 restrictions).<\/p>\n

Most members, however, expressed opposition to Facebook data sharing policies.\u00a0 When prompted to provide their opinions about Facebook\u2019s sharing their data with advertisers, approximately 50% answered \u201cstrongly oppose\u201d or \u201csomewhat oppose,\u201d 40% selected \u201cdon\u2019t care,\u201d and only 10% favored this.\u00a0 Approximately 80% see a reputation risk in using Facebook, 65% see a consumer risk, and 60% believe that a potential transparency benefit is not worth exposure to these risks.
\nDiscussion<\/em><\/p>\n

Facebook delivers consumers and their rich social information to for-profit enterprises.\u00a0 Facebook users are complicit in this, however, in our study we find ignorance, disinterest, ambivalence, and some concern but very little enthusiasm for this role. They are not so much proactively expressing the ideal of social transparency as they are simply not bothering to resist commercialization via Facebook. We conclude our paper by discussing the implications.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Jason Treit (@tagfu), \u201cInterpersonal Commons\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of social media\u2019s recurring tensions is that between privacy norms and commodification of data. “You own your data” is a drumbeat behind numerous campaigns to defend privacy. From the other direction, ownership claims are taken to justify rights-reassigning terms of service and aggressive data mining. These efforts to assert and reassert possession, each grounded on a similar model of data as private property, quietly constitute a double overreach into the interpersonal commons.<\/p>\n

As it has for cultural works, the data ownership model mistakes social life as a series of resource transfers between private hands. The habit of attaching a possessive pronoun to the contents of many minds suggests a tangle of broken claims within that group. What you know of me, once ascertained, is either \u2018yours\u2019 to reuse or \u2018mine\u2019 to reclaim: no room is left for \u2018ours\u2019, a space governing unowned things, where future choices to share or withhold turn on norms and negotiation. Worse, the logic of ownership tends to standardize against informal, overlapping claims on resources, even where informality and overlap may yield advantages to groups not represented in the rights discourse.<\/p>\n

Another view recognizes how the spaces and connections between individuals more closely resemble a commons than a series of private enclosures. Sharing \u2013 the diffusion of knowledge through these channels \u2013 does not close off future reuse. Rather, sharing is a trusting surrender of perfect control. This need not point to chaos: the fieldwork of Elinor Ostrom shows the viability of real-world commons, from Nepalese irrigation systems to open source software projects. Ostrom\u2019s principles of sustainable commons map well to two distinct but related ideas for privacy tagging by Jonathan Zittrain and Aza Raskin, respectively. In contrast to the Facebook status quo of (often illusory) privacy controls, these new proposals share a goal of being declarative and non-coercive: signs that specify intent rather than barriers that prohibit. As such, they rate to enrich the interpersonal commons that is social media, promoting respect for individual preferences without overestimating the reach of private claims upon knowledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Habermas argues that a healthy public sphere can only grow from a relatively autonomous private sphere.\u00a0 The maintenance and development of this public sphere is of prime importance to the health of an open society, but this era may be passing.\u00a0 The development of online social networks challenges the integrity and usefulness of a distinction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":563,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9549,10598],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-announcements","category-theorizing-the-web-2011"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/563"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1852"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2145,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1852\/revisions\/2145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}