U.C. Santa Barbara Professor Ben Zhao noted it’s “just another step in the ‘Zuckering’ of our social norms, slowly eroding what most people consider to be over-the-line from a privacy perspective.” (In his work, Zhao happens to specialize in “large-distributed networks and systems, data mining and modeling, security and privacy, and wireless/mobile systems,” with current projects focused on “querying, modeling and mining massive graphs, analysis of social networks and online communities, and wireless systems and protocols.”)
A question and an observation about "Seen By":
1) If one visits a Group and sees a new post in the Group's feed that includes a link and/or picture, BUT, you do not
click on that post, you have seen at least some or all of the post, but, does Facebook count that as 'Seen by' if you didn't open it? (Similar to
seeing email in your inbox but unless you open it, it's still unread.)
2) Imagine if former Egyptian leader Mubarack, Libyan dictator Kadaffi or other totalitarian leaders across the Middle East and North Africa had access to "Seen by"
about 2 years ago and had "authorities" monitor who was viewing what
group posts (currently, the "Seen by" feature allows any of us to see
every single Facebook user who had viewed a group post). Social media
was the revolutionary driving force behind the grassroots
organizing/uprising of the Arab Spring ... and now Syria's Assad (along with Russian & Chinese leaders who are blocking U.N. action against Syria's Assad) now can exploit "Seen by" to garner significant intelligence of civilians who may have been basing their survival on communicating via Facebook .
"Seen by" and other privacy intrusion features introduced on social media (and the trend these features portend) turn back the clock on online privacy and fundamental privacy in general ... giving
authoritarians a significant new 1984-ish advantage in monitoring who is
communicating with who in the new online social media frontier that was just beginning to be leveraged
to overcome generations of oppression by dictatorial tyrants (all under
the guise of "protecting us" from now being able to see who viewed the
picture of the precious child shown in the swing [a picture that the
photographer choose to put out there in the first place]).
Familiar with hoovers.com? Ever purchase a subscription from this business profiling and prospecting social media platform? If you did and your work involves global business, you may have noticed that while email, telephone number and other contact information about business leaders (from C-levels to managers) is exhaustive for US based companies, contact information on all levels of leaders for non-US companies is not available in Hoovers. Why? A major reason is elected officials from other nations have institutionalized vastly more protective privacy laws that prohibit any entities from data gathering, profiling, monitoring people ... which raises a 3rd question: How are other nations addressing Facebook's ongoing encroachments into privacy? (Maybe there are quiet mandates that force companies to comply with standards in those nations, or face the prospect of having these services banned in those nations.)
Facebook's "Seen by" feature can be viewed as
'chilling'. Facebook's ongoing approach to quietly slip these privacy
violating capabilities into production virtually unannounced is
instructive (as was Facebook's approach to mandating Timeline).
A silver lining? Maybe these relentless Facebook privacy encroachments on the new frontier of social media will inspire innovators to introduce competitive social media platforms or even new paradigms that meet a growing market need of privacy (that Facebook and other platforms continue to erode).
A silver lining? Maybe these relentless Facebook privacy encroachments on the new frontier of social media will inspire innovators to introduce competitive social media platforms or even new paradigms that meet a growing market need of privacy (that Facebook and other platforms continue to erode).
