I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy

Facebook Nation

When David Cameron became Britain’s prime minister, he made an appointment to talk to another head of state—Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, that Mark Zuckerberg: the billionaire wunderkind, the founder of Facebook. At the meeting at 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Cameron and Facebook President Zuckerberg discussed ways in which social networks could take over certain governmental duties and inform public policymaking.1

A month later, Zuckerberg and Cameron had a follow-up conversation, later posted on YouTube. Cameron, dressed in suit and tie, chatted with Zuckerberg, who wore a blue cotton T-shirt.2 “Basically, we’ve got a big problem here,” Cameron pointed out to Zuckerberg, describing the U.K.’s financial woes.

Zuckerberg outlined how Facebook could be used as a platform to decrease spending and increase public participation in the political process: “I mean all these people have great ideas and a lot of energy that they want to bring and I think for a lot of people it’s just about having an easy and a cheap way for them too to communicate their ideas.”

“Brilliant,” Cameron said.

Within a year, Zuckerberg had a seat at the table with government leaders. In May 2011, he attended the G8 Summit, the annual meeting of key heads of state (named after the eight advanced economies—France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada, and Russia).3 The media reported that world leaders from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to French President Nicolas Sarkozy were more in awe of Zuckerberg than he was of them.4 Zuckerberg summarized how Facebook had played a role in worldwide democratic movements and pressed his own policy agenda—urging European officials to back off of proposed regulation of the internet. “People tell me on the one hand ‘It’s great you played such a big role in the Arab spring, but it’s also kind of scary because you enable all this sharing and collect information on people,’ ” Zuckerberg said.

Is it odd to think of Mark Zuckerberg as a head of state? Perhaps. But Facebook has the power and reach of a nation. With more than 750 million members, Facebook’s population would make it the third largest nation in the world. It has citizens, an economy, its own currency, systems for resolving disputes, and relations with other nations and institutions. After watching the video chat between Cameron and Zuckerberg, I became intrigued by the concept of a social network as a nation. I began to wonder, what kind of government rules Facebook? What are its politics? And, if it is like a nation, should it have a Constitution?

People are drawn to Facebook, as early settlers are drawn to any new nation, by the search for freedom. Social networks expand people’s opportunities. An ordinary individual can be a reporter, alerting the world to breaking news of a natural disaster or a political crisis. Or an investigator, helping cops solve a crime. Filmmakers and musicians at the start of their careers can find large followings through social networks.

The power of people is harnessed in new ways on social networks. Art itself is redefined as bands and novelists post early works and use crowdsourcing to change the music, lyrics, and story lines. Anybody can be a scientist, participating in a crowdsourced research project. In the Galaxy Zoo project, members of the public classify data from a million galaxies and publish the results in scientific journals. Facebook itself uses crowdsourcing to translate its pages into foreign languages.

Social networks also provide new ways for people to interact with government. The White House asked its Twitter followers for comments on a tax law.5 An official from the National Economic Council then posted a blog with links to questions raised by the Twitter followers, eliciting a discussion about the direction tax policy should take. In 2011, the social network created by the city of San Francisco introduced a phone app that allowed citizens to take photos of potholes and other things that needed maintenance and upload them directly to the proper city office to order repairs. Through that same network, people with CPR skills can volunteer to help in an emergency. If someone has a heart attack on a golf course, a smart- phone app will recruit volunteers in the area based on their GPS position and ask them to rush over to Hole 7 to render aid.

And when people get fed up with their government, they can use Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to incite others to join them in the streets to protest. While previous forms of political protest required a charismatic leader, that leader could be killed or his headquarters destroyed. It’s much more difficult to stop a widely dispersed group of antagonists such as the citizens of Facebook Nation. It’s harder to put out thousands of revolutionary fires burning across the Web.

Social networks have enormous benefits, helping us stay in touch with people from our pasts and introducing us to people who share our interests. They create a much-needed comfort zone. As philosopher Ian Bogost points out, “Public spaces in general have been destroyed, privatized, and policed in recent decades, but the public life of teens and young adults has been particularly damaged, due to additional fears of abduction, abuse, criminality, and moral corruption.”6 According to Bogost, social networks provide a place to hang out, akin to the main drag or the video arcade of the past.

Social networks have become ubiquitous, necessary, and addictive. Social networking is no longer just a pastime; it’s a way of life. People expect to be able to log on to Facebook or Myspace wherever they go and to tweet their every thought. Until recently, cell phones and internet use were banned in certain places, like courthouses, but now social institutions have largely abandoned their efforts to keep someone away from their Facebook friends or Twitter audience. As a result, there’s a whole new set of issues, with judges friending defendants, jurors looking up witnesses’ Facebook pages to assess their credibility, and lawyers blogging about confidential interchanges with their clients.

The military held out for a long time. In August 2009, the U.S. Marine Corps formalized its ban on marines’ use of Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube on its networks.7 The military’s concern was the same as it is with many of us—phishing, hacking, and other security breaches. But the stakes were much higher. It’s a hassle when you have to get a new credit card because your American Express number is hacked through PlayStation.8 But it’s much more serious if military design secrets are stolen by other countries or soldiers die when confidential battle plans are revealed.9

The military ban made sense except for two things. It was hard enough to get people to enlist in an all-volunteer armed services. But morale sank even lower when they were cut off from Facebook friends and Myspace family members. And the technology of armed conflict itself was demanding a link to the Web. For certain weapons to be used most effectively, soldiers need access to smartphone apps—such as iSnipe and Shooter—to estimate bullet trajectories. Another app allows soldiers to see the positions of friendly soldiers and enemy combatants on a map updated in real time.10 There’s even an app—Jibbigo—to translate a particular Iraqi dialect of Arabic.11 And another, Telehealth Mood Tracker, to measure a soldier’s mental health.12

In February 2010, the U.S. military embraced social networks in a big way. The military reconfigured its internet grid, NIPRNET (Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network)—the largest private network in the world—to provide soldiers access to YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Google apps.13 The army began issuing smartphones to soldiers to test the apps’ effectiveness both in and out of combat.14 In war zones, wireless networks on which to run the apps are brought into the field attached to vehicles, planes, or air balloons.15

Not just our soldiers but our global enemies are taking to social networks. A 2010 Department of Homeland Security Report entitled “Terrorist Use of Social Networking Sites: Facebook Case Study” found that jihad supporters and mujahedeen are increasingly using Facebook to propagate operational information, including improvised explosive device (IED) recipes in Arabic, English, Indonesian, Urdu, and other languages.16

A 2,000-member militant Islamic Facebook group includes informational videos on “tactical shooting,” “getting to know your AK-47,” “how to field strip an AK-47,” and so forth.17 Facebook pages for other extremist Islamist groups contain propaganda videos featuring wounded and dead Palestinians in Gaza, links to Al Qaeda YouTube videos, and videos promoting female suicide bombers, all of which can be accessed by the public without becoming a “fan” of the groups, “liking” the groups, or “friending” the Facebook pages.

Even criminals use the Web for everything from figuring out who to rob by checking Facebook posts containing the word “vacation” to using a search engine to train for murder. Sometimes virtually the whole crime can be reconstructed from a search history, as in the case of a nurse who killed her husband after Googling “undetectable poisons,” “state gun laws,” “instant poison,” “gun laws in Pennsylvania,” “toxic insulin levels,” . . . “how to commit murder,” “how to purchase hunting rifles in NJ,”. . . “neuromuscular blocking agents,” . . . “chloral hydra...