Particularly given NSA-gate and the heightened awareness about pervasive surveillance it’s bestowed upon us, we’re ready to see eavesdropping governments and their corporate lackeys lurking in every corner of the internet.īut there’s a yawning gap between what people think can and cannot be monitored and what is actually possible. That said, Facebook was still looking over its users’ shoulders in a fashion that would likely come as an unpleasant surprise to many of them. Only a binary value that content was entered at all. In other words, the content of self-censored posts and comments was not sent back to Facebook's servers. It’s the nature of the web.īut the researchers took pains to state that while they did track the presence or absence of text entered, they explicitly did not listen in on the abandoned content indeed, they tracked neither the keystrokes nor the content entered.Īll instrumentation was done on the client side. As I said above, anybody with a website can capture what we type into their website as we type it. The problem with this thinking is that it conflates two things: 1) Facebook’s ability to capture data about users who started typing something but then didn’t publish it, and 2) the incorrect notion that Facebook tracked the content of what users typed.Ĭould Facebook have captured my need for salve? Absolutely. In her Slate article, Golbeck interprets Facebook’s 17-day collection of self-censorship data for this research to be an invasion of privacy in that, as she writes, “the things you explicitly choose not to share aren’t entirely private.” Understanding the conditions under which censorship occurs presents an opportunity to gain further insight into both how users use social media and how to improve to better minimize use-cases where present solutions might unknowingly promote value diminishing self-censorship Users and their audience could fail to achieve potential social value from not sharing certain content, and the loses value from the lack of content generation. While second thoughts come in handy to stop people who might otherwise post truly embarrassing Facebook or other social media content, as far as the social networks themselves are concerned, self-censoring users just starve sites of the content they otherwise feed upon. Why in the world would Facebook, Twitter, or similar care so much about my rash and subsequent decision not to tell the world about it? If the content wasn’t shared within 10 minutes, it was marked as self-censored. The researchers tracked that a user had started writing content only if a Facebook user typed at least five characters into a compose or comment box. This is not news, but it’s certainly worth repeating: anybody with a website can capture what you type, as you type it, if they want to.) (Note: logging keystrokes is no super secret, privacy-sucking vampire sauce. A quote that serves as a helpful reminder that they could have tracked your keystrokes if they had wanted to. To protect users’ privacy the researchers decided to record “only the presence or absence of text entered, not the keystrokes or content”. That’s simple as pie, really: they used code they had embedded in the web pages to determine if anything had been typed into the forms in which we compose status updates or comment on people’s posts. How did they know when one of the Facebook users under their microscope had decided to back out of a post? Over the course of 17 days in July 2012, the two researchers collected self-censorship data from a random sample of about 5 million English-speaking Facebook users in the US or UK. Slate published an article Golbeck wrote up about a paper, titled Self-Censorship on Facebook ( PDF), that describes a study conducted by two Facebook researchers: Sauvik Das, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon and summer software engineer intern at Facebook, and Adam Kramer, a Facebook data scientist. That’s a point brought up on Friday by Jennifer Golbeck, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and an associate professor at the University of Maryland. If that text were a Facebook status update (or a Twitter tweet, a Yahoo email, a comment on a blog or any other typing on a web page), cancelling it doesn’t, theoretically, really matter: what I wrote could still have been recorded, even if I decided not to post it. Let’s say that, mid-oversharing, I thought better about writing a Facebook post about how the rash has now spread to my … (cue the backspacing, the select all/delete, hitting cancel or whatever it takes to avoid telling the world about that itch).
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