Faced on Facebook

The first decade of the millennium is dominated by constant interactions and connections between different individuals or organizations. Whereas chatlogs and emails where the most common way of keeping in touch and making new acquaintances, that need has grown to constantly keeping oneself updated on the personal life of other people and exposing oneself as well in the process. This has been facilitated by social networks which basically is a virtual community having profiles of individuals who freely choose to expose personal information and gives one the ability to keep up already existing relationships or else start new ones by adding friends to your profile. The more friends you have the more you are extending the chance of expanding your network of friends thereby increasing your “popularity”. The more applications that are added to the network, the more interesting it becomes and indirectly forces one to use them causing cravings and urges to check one’s profile every day, becoming an addiction in extreme cases. As the inventor of facebook himself, Mark Zuckerberg pointed out in Facebook blog, that nowadays Facebook is not just a small website but a fully fledged nation because if all the Facebook users are added up it would be sixth most populated country in the world telling us the sheer size of the social networks and particulary the most popular ones which are getting bigger day-by-day.

However such utilities also cause unintended consequences which are invisible to the users. These mainly include procrastination, phishing, routinization, ritualization, gossip and rumors leading to privacy invasions. However, in this case the unintended consequence are not necessarily negative. Having a large number of friends on Facebook increases the number of contacts available to a fast-growing company which is actively recruiting potential employees. Also, the huge infiltration of commercial messages most of which is spam, or sharing news about a job opening in a way that is beneficial is an effective way, probably the only one to use for business matters.

However, the users don’t think about what might happen if they disclose too much information relating to their private lives such as their place of work or telephone number. Otherwise they don’t use the options available in the site to set your set your settings to private even though complete privacy is not assured with utilities like Facebook. It is also a procrascination trap. Taking office workers as an example, who are also avid users of Facebook, the effects are being felt in several ways. It distracts workers from focusing wholly on their task, but also create more tangible problems especially in smaller offices where excessive online social networking can boost demand on bandwidth and cut into IT costs. Most fear that excessive time spent on such websites causes a loss in productivity as procrastination sets in. However, others view it as an effective networking tool that connects sales reps, marketers and other workers.

But facebook demography is also highly comprised of students who also fall into the trap of procrascination as facebook becomes embedded as a feature of our lives which we cannot live without. It eventually becomes a vicious cycle as time continues to be wasted and work postponed. However, the loop I chose to represent in the Causal loop diagram is a balancing loop relating to the high exposure devoted to the extra information added on the profile which is enough to cause privacy invasion in the form of phishing, hacking, harassment, gossip and data mining. This however annoys the user which becomes more aware of the risk being faced and therefore cautiously minimizes the amount of information shared and delete more "friends" which will eventually minimize the exposure of the user. The sad reality is that when everyone is on Facebook or other network site, its difficult to “hide out” even if you reject friend requests because the photos that you took last weekend with your friend could end up on the profile of your friend and either way tagging your name would still disclose your identity. Even decreasing your profile visibility by restricting access to friends is a weak mechanism.

Users therefore do not consider beyond the 'visible' which relates to the social networking and amusement from the user's perspective. There is another reality which is the 'invisible' part which essentially consists of the large network of detailed personal data that is voluntarily provided by the users themselves and can be used to be aggregated, filtered and re-organized for the purposes of targeted marketing or advertising, or abuse of the personal information by third parties to mention a few.

Social network services are conceptually designed to exposure of individuals and their exploitation of the social information users provide willingly rather than improving privacy levels. If a user is being hacked or rumours start spreading, a user prefers to lessen the amount of information provided rather than deleting his profile. This is because facebook has become something of a ritualization where you have to maintain communication via technology. Social networking is therefore embedded in a typical student’s life and is difficult to disengage. Most people have over 1,000 friends many of which would not be acquaintances. Therefore as time goes by and you start accumulating more friends and making more connections, you are unconcerned about temporal boundary intrusion (threats to privacy due to data persistence). The benefits of using Facebook outweigh privacy concern even when actual privacy invasion is experienced. When users chose to only “allow friends” they think that they did enough from security concerns. However, by restricting one’s profile and also the number of one’s friends one can put his mind at rest even though the risk Facebook creates to privacy should not be taken lightly in the first place. Safer use of social network sites would thus require a dramatic change in user attitudes.