25 ms·

Gay on Facebook: Nowhere to Hide

27 points by edw519 16y ago

tjmaxal 16y ago
The idea that you can't really keep secrets on the internet shouldn't really be news to anyone. Especially not here. That being said, I think most people's privacy is kept because there just aren't that many people interested in you in general. Unless you do something to make yourself a target.
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  I think Scott Adams said something like this in The Dilbert Future; he claimed that privacy in the future won't be a huge issue because we're all so boring.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
thenduks 16y ago
I fail to see how a friend posting a comment exposing the relationship on facebook is any different than that same friend making the same kind of comment while out for drinks 'IRL'. This has nothing to do with 'social media'.
- raganwald 16y ago
  When someone comments while out for drinks, three people hear it. They may tell a few people, and the word will get around within a circle of friends who know each other. It may never reach other circles of your friends. In my own case, the circle of my FB friends that I know from technology do not overlap with the circle of friends that I know from sports very much. Something could easily go around one circle and not the other. But FB merges them: Something on my wall is visible of all of my circles of friends. That's what I took from the article: Social Media kicks down the walls between circles of friends.
  - thenduks 16y ago
    Of course you are right: There is almost certainly going to be a difference in the magnitude of a 'breach'. I still think this is way out of proportion. Let's use the example of your two circles. Assuming a few/some/most/all of your friends are in the same geographical area, how common is it to run into people from group A while out with group B (and thus open the possibility of group A people making comments you don't want group B to hear)? I know for me situations like this are very common. Just the other day I was leaving a restaurant with friends and ran into other completely unrelated friends who were sitting on the patio. I don't think that just because Facebook is an easier way for your clueless/inconsiderate friends to let stuff slip is Facebook's problem, is all I'm saying. Facebook is just the highest profile, most widely used method of having a persona online. That comes with upsides and downsides -- if you aren't comfortable with the risks you can simply not partake.
- rmorrison 16y ago
  It would only be the same if everybody you know was out getting drinks with you (including family, friends, coworkers, etc), and the comment was made loud enough for all to hear. Before social media, your siblings likely wouldn't hear a conversation between two of your friends when your name is mentioned.
- genki 16y ago
  The main differences are the audience and the permanence. A comment on facebook is likely seen by everyone that friend knows, and the gay person doesn't control the friend's privacy settings, just his own. The other thing is that a comment on facebook is there to be seen whenever someone comes across it, as opposed to a careless comment which may or may not be heard or comprehended by anyone that heard it. One of the other important points to note is that people often have different circles of friends, who may or may not intersect, and even if you control what one group of friends knows, you can't control whether the other group of friends happens to let something slip. A situation that likely wouldn't arise IRL could happen due to the Kevin Bacon degrees of separation rule (sometimes a group of friends will intersect another group through the most bizarre circumstances). edit: I took too long to type this out obviously. Ha.
CodeMage 16y ago
Keeping an eagle eye on tagged photos This is one of the things that goes beyond Facebook as a platform and technology and becomes a cultural issue. You can delete your Facebook account or never get on Facebook in the first place, but that won't stop people from publishing photos of you on it. I can't help feeling it has become socially acceptable for your friends or even acquaintances to publish photos of you on the Internet. Facebook is now an integral part of our culture. Its precipitous growth is owed to the fact that it works only if it’s massive. The more people participate, the more utility it has, and the more utility it has, the more compulsory participation becomes. And this is precisely why so many people are making a fuss about Facebook's privacy policy and attitude towards privacy. Whether we all like it or not, Facebook has become a part of our global culture and it influences the way we think and behave. If part of its influence is to encourage you to stop caring about your privacy -- or even to simply refrain from reminding you to take care of it -- then we won't need to worry about anyone taking our privacy away; we, the society, will give it up on our own.
- JadeNB 16y ago
  > Facebook is now an integral part of our culture. Its precipitous growth is owed to the fact that it works only if it’s massive. The more people participate, the more utility it has, and the more utility it has, the more compulsory participation becomes. I came to mention exactly this same sentence. Maybe it's just that I'm out of the loop—but I'm 30, not a complete technological outsider, and I have never used Facebook or felt any pressure to do so. In what sense is this participation compulsory? I'd have liked to see some more elaboration on this principle that seems often to be taken for granted. (I'd particularly be interested to hear an argument that couldn't also have been applied to AOL in the early '90's—I really did consider it vital to be there to communicate with out-of-state friends without enormous phone bills, but the notion nowadays of participation in AOL being compulsory is laughable.)
  - CodeMage 16y ago
    It's not really compulsory in the sense that someone is making you participate. It's simply the peer pressure. Here's some "anecdata" to illustrate the point: I don't have a Facebook account anymore, but my wife does. Anyone among my friends and family who wants to see my son's photos is told to go to my wife's photo gallery. Sure, we could use Picasa or Flickr or even e-mail, but she's already using Facebook and it's easier that way. So if a friend or family member wants to see the photos and doesn't have a Facebook account, they have an additional small incentive to get one. Facebook has become one of those things everyone mentions now and then. You can use it to keep in touch with high school friends (even those you didn't like in the first place), to exchange gossip, to kill time (if you think mindlessly watching TV is the worst you can do with your time, think again), etc. If everyone around you uses it for something and mentions it often enough, you'll feel left out of that. Those of us who can say "well, I'm glad to be left out of that" are a minority.
psyklic 16y ago
The article missed perhaps the easiest way to surmise if someone is gay on Facebook -- mutual friends. If you both are gay, you probably have the same gay mutual friends. Ever since I started adding gay people, I started getting friend requests from other random gay people (I'm assuming who use Facebook for dating).
michael_dorfman 16y ago
I think the article is missing the point. It's not that you can't have a secret and be on Facebook-- it's that you can't have anybody who knows your secret be on Facebook. Put another way: even if "Joe" (from the article) were not on Facebook, that wouldn't have stopped someone from posting a comment about his boyfriend. People talk about other people. You can't control what they say. If these people are publishing their comments (to their "friends", or on blogs, to the general public), you're shit out of luck.
- brown9-2 16y ago
  Furthermore, the example outlined in the opening could have just as easily happened in an overheard real-life conversation rather than online. Joe was upset with our friend for sending the tweet, the content of which was a bit careless but totally benign, and my response to him was a combination of devil’s advocacy and good old-fashioned tough love. Joe's friend could have been just as careless (or ignorant about his sexuality being a secret) by making a comment in front of people who were not aware of the secret. The issue isn't being online, or Facebook or Twitter - the issue is keeping a secret. edit: whoops, thenduks made the same exact argument I made here, but better
  - marcusbooster 16y ago
    It could be mitigated if Facebook offered real privacy controls, mainly keeping our social circles separate from each other like we do in real life. I'd like the option: if a member of network X posts on my wall, members from network Y and Z should not be able to see it. But that would require real privacy controls and it goes against Facebook's absurd mission statement to open up the entire world (or whatever that embroidery is inside that dopey hoodie).
- lotharbot 16y ago
  Even more to the point: you can't have a secret that other people know about and aren't completely diligent about protecting. Somebody letting your secret slip offline means one of your social circles will find out, and if you're very, very lucky it will stop there. But chance meetings do take place; your cousin bumps into one of your coworkers in the airport, notices his company shirt, and says "hey, do you know my cousin lotharbot? Did you know he really likes the Teletubbies?" Facebook speeds up this process by increasing meetings between people from your different social circles. But fundamentally, the problem isn't Facebook, the problem is your friends letting your secret slip.
Sam_Odio 16y ago
This smacks of link bait & bandwagoning. The author's experience with Twitter is contorted to support a statement about Facebook. The FUD among the mainstream press is getting a little tiresome and distracts from the real privacy issues on the site. Instead I'd prefer to see a concrete discussion of exactly what controls/features are broken - that's much more actionable on my end. Disclaimer: I work for Facebook, but don't speak on their behalf.
- moultano 16y ago
  This article is not complaining about facebook privacy. On the contrary, it's claiming that facebook will become an unexpected force for good in the struggle for gay rights by merging people's circle of friends and unifying their public personas.
- meh2themeh 16y ago
  I think you just misunderstood the article. This isn't FUD, mostly because it wasn't an attack on Facebook, not even slightly, and also is entirely true. I am gay and have noticed exactly what the author is talking about with myself and many others. I don't write anything ever on Facebook (sorry, it bores me to tears, I don't hold Facebook use against anyone though :), but it is completely obvious from my mutual friends, from the fact that my profile says who my boyfriend is, etc, that I am gay. It is a simple fact that Facebook (and other social networks to a lesser extent), blur together social circles that otherwise never would have blended. For example, both sides of my extended family in totally different areas of the country friend me. These are people who I never bothered to formally come out to (because we aren't in reality that close). Simply accepting their invite is also an act of uncloseting. For someone who actually is in the closet, that degree of uncloseting is possibly very uncomfortable, and hard to know if you are even doing it (is it obvious or not from my mutual friends that I'm gay?). This absolutely is not a kind of thing that happened in the pre-social network world. But, this also is not, in any way, because of Facebook privacy problems or controls or whatever. It is an inherent property of the kind of very transparent, mixed "all social circles are one social circle" model that Facebook (and other social network sites) have. Maybe other people don't notice this as much because a lot of gay people (especially closeted gay people) were more used to having extremely disjoint social groups which the online world suddenly makes dramatically less disjoint. Anyway, if you actually read the whole article, the author writes about this as a positive thing, because it makes the closet much harder to choose, since the traditional problem of policing your life to your closet door closed becomes so much harder. The author interprets this in the end as being a social positive since coming out is in a way a political and socially influential act.
CapitalistCartr 16y ago
Why on Earth do people have only one Facebook profile? If the software doesn't provide for better separation automatically, do it manually. Imagine it's a CLI and you have to write the commands yourself.
- vsync 16y ago
  Because Facebook only allows you to have one profile and requires you to use your real name.
  - lotharbot 16y ago
    Facebook's terms of service say that, but I haven't seen any indication that they enforce it.
    - noarchy 16y ago
      I don't think they would enforce it, unless someone went out of their way to rat someone out for doing it. I personally know a few folks who have multiple Facebook accounts, and have long-considered doing it, too.

27 points by edw519 16y ago

The idea that you can't really keep secrets on the internet shouldn't really be news to anyone. Especially not here. That being said, I think most people's privacy is kept because there just aren't that many people interested in you in general. Unless you do something to make yourself a target.

pavel_lishin 16y ago
I think Scott Adams said something like this in The Dilbert Future; he claimed that privacy in the future won't be a huge issue because we're all so boring.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

thenduks 16y ago

I fail to see how a friend posting a comment exposing the relationship on facebook is any different than that same friend making the same kind of comment while out for drinks 'IRL'. This has nothing to do with 'social media'.

raganwald 16y ago
When someone comments while out for drinks, three people hear it. They may tell a few people, and the word will get around within a circle of friends who know each other. It may never reach other circles of your friends. In my own case, the circle of my FB friends that I know from technology do not overlap with the circle of friends that I know from sports very much. Something could easily go around one circle and not the other. But FB merges them: Something on my wall is visible of all of my circles of friends. That's what I took from the article: Social Media kicks down the walls between circles of friends.
- thenduks 16y ago
  Of course you are right: There is almost certainly going to be a difference in the magnitude of a 'breach'. I still think this is way out of proportion. Let's use the example of your two circles. Assuming a few/some/most/all of your friends are in the same geographical area, how common is it to run into people from group A while out with group B (and thus open the possibility of group A people making comments you don't want group B to hear)? I know for me situations like this are very common. Just the other day I was leaving a restaurant with friends and ran into other completely unrelated friends who were sitting on the patio. I don't think that just because Facebook is an easier way for your clueless/inconsiderate friends to let stuff slip is Facebook's problem, is all I'm saying. Facebook is just the highest profile, most widely used method of having a persona online. That comes with upsides and downsides -- if you aren't comfortable with the risks you can simply not partake.
rmorrison 16y ago
It would only be the same if everybody you know was out getting drinks with you (including family, friends, coworkers, etc), and the comment was made loud enough for all to hear. Before social media, your siblings likely wouldn't hear a conversation between two of your friends when your name is mentioned.
genki 16y ago
The main differences are the audience and the permanence. A comment on facebook is likely seen by everyone that friend knows, and the gay person doesn't control the friend's privacy settings, just his own. The other thing is that a comment on facebook is there to be seen whenever someone comes across it, as opposed to a careless comment which may or may not be heard or comprehended by anyone that heard it. One of the other important points to note is that people often have different circles of friends, who may or may not intersect, and even if you control what one group of friends knows, you can't control whether the other group of friends happens to let something slip. A situation that likely wouldn't arise IRL could happen due to the Kevin Bacon degrees of separation rule (sometimes a group of friends will intersect another group through the most bizarre circumstances). edit: I took too long to type this out obviously. Ha.

CodeMage 16y ago

Keeping an eagle eye on tagged photos This is one of the things that goes beyond Facebook as a platform and technology and becomes a cultural issue. You can delete your Facebook account or never get on Facebook in the first place, but that won't stop people from publishing photos of you on it. I can't help feeling it has become socially acceptable for your friends or even acquaintances to publish photos of you on the Internet. Facebook is now an integral part of our culture. Its precipitous growth is owed to the fact that it works only if it’s massive. The more people participate, the more utility it has, and the more utility it has, the more compulsory participation becomes. And this is precisely why so many people are making a fuss about Facebook's privacy policy and attitude towards privacy. Whether we all like it or not, Facebook has become a part of our global culture and it influences the way we think and behave. If part of its influence is to encourage you to stop caring about your privacy -- or even to simply refrain from reminding you to take care of it -- then we won't need to worry about anyone taking our privacy away; we, the society, will give it up on our own.

JadeNB 16y ago
> Facebook is now an integral part of our culture. Its precipitous growth is owed to the fact that it works only if it’s massive. The more people participate, the more utility it has, and the more utility it has, the more compulsory participation becomes. I came to mention exactly this same sentence. Maybe it's just that I'm out of the loop—but I'm 30, not a complete technological outsider, and I have never used Facebook or felt any pressure to do so. In what sense is this participation compulsory? I'd have liked to see some more elaboration on this principle that seems often to be taken for granted. (I'd particularly be interested to hear an argument that couldn't also have been applied to AOL in the early '90's—I really did consider it vital to be there to communicate with out-of-state friends without enormous phone bills, but the notion nowadays of participation in AOL being compulsory is laughable.)
- CodeMage 16y ago
  It's not really compulsory in the sense that someone is making you participate. It's simply the peer pressure. Here's some "anecdata" to illustrate the point: I don't have a Facebook account anymore, but my wife does. Anyone among my friends and family who wants to see my son's photos is told to go to my wife's photo gallery. Sure, we could use Picasa or Flickr or even e-mail, but she's already using Facebook and it's easier that way. So if a friend or family member wants to see the photos and doesn't have a Facebook account, they have an additional small incentive to get one. Facebook has become one of those things everyone mentions now and then. You can use it to keep in touch with high school friends (even those you didn't like in the first place), to exchange gossip, to kill time (if you think mindlessly watching TV is the worst you can do with your time, think again), etc. If everyone around you uses it for something and mentions it often enough, you'll feel left out of that. Those of us who can say "well, I'm glad to be left out of that" are a minority.

psyklic 16y ago

The article missed perhaps the easiest way to surmise if someone is gay on Facebook -- mutual friends. If you both are gay, you probably have the same gay mutual friends. Ever since I started adding gay people, I started getting friend requests from other random gay people (I'm assuming who use Facebook for dating).

michael_dorfman 16y ago

I think the article is missing the point. It's not that you can't have a secret and be on Facebook-- it's that you can't have anybody who knows your secret be on Facebook. Put another way: even if "Joe" (from the article) were not on Facebook, that wouldn't have stopped someone from posting a comment about his boyfriend. People talk about other people. You can't control what they say. If these people are publishing their comments (to their "friends", or on blogs, to the general public), you're shit out of luck.

brown9-2 16y ago
Furthermore, the example outlined in the opening could have just as easily happened in an overheard real-life conversation rather than online. Joe was upset with our friend for sending the tweet, the content of which was a bit careless but totally benign, and my response to him was a combination of devil’s advocacy and good old-fashioned tough love. Joe's friend could have been just as careless (or ignorant about his sexuality being a secret) by making a comment in front of people who were not aware of the secret. The issue isn't being online, or Facebook or Twitter - the issue is keeping a secret. edit: whoops, thenduks made the same exact argument I made here, but better
- marcusbooster 16y ago
  It could be mitigated if Facebook offered real privacy controls, mainly keeping our social circles separate from each other like we do in real life. I'd like the option: if a member of network X posts on my wall, members from network Y and Z should not be able to see it. But that would require real privacy controls and it goes against Facebook's absurd mission statement to open up the entire world (or whatever that embroidery is inside that dopey hoodie).
lotharbot 16y ago
Even more to the point: you can't have a secret that other people know about and aren't completely diligent about protecting. Somebody letting your secret slip offline means one of your social circles will find out, and if you're very, very lucky it will stop there. But chance meetings do take place; your cousin bumps into one of your coworkers in the airport, notices his company shirt, and says "hey, do you know my cousin lotharbot? Did you know he really likes the Teletubbies?" Facebook speeds up this process by increasing meetings between people from your different social circles. But fundamentally, the problem isn't Facebook, the problem is your friends letting your secret slip.

Sam_Odio 16y ago

This smacks of link bait & bandwagoning. The author's experience with Twitter is contorted to support a statement about Facebook. The FUD among the mainstream press is getting a little tiresome and distracts from the real privacy issues on the site. Instead I'd prefer to see a concrete discussion of exactly what controls/features are broken - that's much more actionable on my end. Disclaimer: I work for Facebook, but don't speak on their behalf.

moultano 16y ago
This article is not complaining about facebook privacy. On the contrary, it's claiming that facebook will become an unexpected force for good in the struggle for gay rights by merging people's circle of friends and unifying their public personas.
meh2themeh 16y ago
I think you just misunderstood the article. This isn't FUD, mostly because it wasn't an attack on Facebook, not even slightly, and also is entirely true. I am gay and have noticed exactly what the author is talking about with myself and many others. I don't write anything ever on Facebook (sorry, it bores me to tears, I don't hold Facebook use against anyone though :), but it is completely obvious from my mutual friends, from the fact that my profile says who my boyfriend is, etc, that I am gay. It is a simple fact that Facebook (and other social networks to a lesser extent), blur together social circles that otherwise never would have blended. For example, both sides of my extended family in totally different areas of the country friend me. These are people who I never bothered to formally come out to (because we aren't in reality that close). Simply accepting their invite is also an act of uncloseting. For someone who actually is in the closet, that degree of uncloseting is possibly very uncomfortable, and hard to know if you are even doing it (is it obvious or not from my mutual friends that I'm gay?). This absolutely is not a kind of thing that happened in the pre-social network world. But, this also is not, in any way, because of Facebook privacy problems or controls or whatever. It is an inherent property of the kind of very transparent, mixed "all social circles are one social circle" model that Facebook (and other social network sites) have. Maybe other people don't notice this as much because a lot of gay people (especially closeted gay people) were more used to having extremely disjoint social groups which the online world suddenly makes dramatically less disjoint. Anyway, if you actually read the whole article, the author writes about this as a positive thing, because it makes the closet much harder to choose, since the traditional problem of policing your life to your closet door closed becomes so much harder. The author interprets this in the end as being a social positive since coming out is in a way a political and socially influential act.

CapitalistCartr 16y ago

Why on Earth do people have only one Facebook profile? If the software doesn't provide for better separation automatically, do it manually. Imagine it's a CLI and you have to write the commands yourself.

vsync 16y ago
Because Facebook only allows you to have one profile and requires you to use your real name.
- lotharbot 16y ago
  Facebook's terms of service say that, but I haven't seen any indication that they enforce it.
  - noarchy 16y ago
    I don't think they would enforce it, unless someone went out of their way to rat someone out for doing it. I personally know a few folks who have multiple Facebook accounts, and have long-considered doing it, too.