Facebook’s Privacy & Security Model A Biomimicry Challenge?
I often revisit my writing on the subject of User Experience (UX) and in that vein, sharing another excerpt from my 2011 book User Experience in the Age of Sustainability. I am blessed that this book has become a textbook in many design programs, and it was one of the first books to tackle the topic of Design practice and Sustainability. Since publishing, so much has changed in terms of the public’s growing consciousness around Sustainability and the climate crisis. I have been and remain a strong advocate for Designers looking to engage within their own circle of influence and sharing some older experiences of the practices as they are sadly still ongoing issues around the topics of Ecology, UX and Design. This is an edited excerpt from my book.
Back then I bore anyone who would listen about the fundamental flaws with Facebook's model. I believe then as I do now that Social Media models are fundamentally flawed as they lack, at the centre, the notion of Human eccentricity. I advocated for a model that borrowed from nature and the analog world in how we began to view the human subject in Digital spaces. Open to any feedback and or collaborations.
Chapter 2: User Experience in the Age of Sustainability (2012)
**Begin Sidebar***
A year before the Facebook security fiasco, I attended an Innovation session on privacy and security. At my table of six designers, as well as our Legal teams, well placed to capture IP, I commented that Facebook will soon face major issues in the future because of their fundamentally flawed model of “friend” definition. Facebook had essentially re-definition who gets access to your information. Facebook’s model of ‘friendship’ assumed that everyone had the same degree of relationship and therefore should have full access to all aspects of my Facebook life, including links to view my other friends.
When you think about the physical world, the same does not hold true. We have friends and acquaintances from different realms– private and public, work, and other life activities and for many of us, it is the desire that they never coincide. Some of our friends and acquaintances have access to our private lives and some have access to our public life profile — some are business and some are family and so on. However, in the Facebook model, the world had turned upside down — in fact, all jumbled. There seems to be an equidistant relationship with all friends, with no difference in terms of how you felt about the closeness of that relationship. In addition, they could access each other via your Facebook page as a connector. On Facebook, the degree of separation was scarily close, especially for those of us who guard our private life a bit more than others.
It was, and still remains, a complicated model in many respects and a challenge for User Experience designers to come up with an ultimate solution of a Privacy model for a social networking site that can be aligned with a magical algorithm that takes into consideration the many complexities of real-life relationships.
What is clear is that on many levels the Facebook model of Privacy and Security was fundamentally flawed.
Recently, I had a conversation with a friend, who happens to be a professor. He recounted how his Facebook had become “weird.” On Facebook, he now has other professors, his ex-wife and her family member, and now his ex-girlfriend, as well as his new girlfriend, and his students as “friends.” He would like to “unfriend” a few people but his gentle nature makes it awkward. Therefore, he has imposed a self-banishment and “hiding” in the Facebook world that has become awkward and hard to manage. This example is a recurring theme of the many who are seeking virtual refuge by taking down their Facebook accounts or simply hiding by creating fake profiles.
On the popular site, www.mashables.com, over five thousand Facebook users were surveyed. They were asked: why are you trying to leave Facebook? 42% of those surveyed indicated it had to do with issues of Privacy and Security of their personal information (30% do not trust Facebook with their personal information another 10% believe Facebook sells their information and 2% do not want people seeing their chats and messages.
How could a model that had looked so promising have gone so wrong? While still popular on some levels, the company is losing the cache afforded to more business-minded social network sites like LinkedIn, which is used by many as a virtual resume and network tool.
The Facebook model made me think of my own life growing up in the Caribbean in what is often called the “Colonies,” for lack of a better and more politically correct term. I recalled as a child the many unspoken house rules of limiting access to certain people who would come to the house. This practice seemed so indoctrinated in our daily lives that I never gave it a second thought. Like many better-off homes in the Caribbean, there were farm workers always in the vicinity as well as other helpers such as housekeepers and other labourers. Implicit in day-to-day living were all these unspoken cues to assert one's privilege over the less privileged. Some people could only access to the “house” and could use the house restrooms, while others were never allowed in the bedrooms and or bathrooms. I remember having certain friends from school that who were prevented access into the house beyond the kitchen and the living room. The grownup relatives around kept a sharp eye on who was inside and outside. They justified it by saying that they may “take something” or gossip about our family and that you could never be too careful, especially in a small village where privacy was almost non-existent.
It was not until much later in life I revisited the Caribbean after living years abroad and I got exposed once again to some of the old ways I had been raised. It got me to think of Privacy and Security, in the context of Facebook.
On this visit, I spent some time on my uncle’s estate where many workers were moving around but very interested in my husband and myself. It was not every day they had guests at the farmhouse. It was then my uncle mentioned how important it was to maintain old ways or else everyone “knows your business” and they become overly familiar and the “proper” social boundaries are then violated and you can “never go back” to the relationship as it was.
The context that spurred on this discussion follows: one of the new farm workers had found his way nearer to the house and started a conversation with my husband about what it was like living in a “cold” country. Snow and just all things foreign fascinated him. Just then, my uncle and his wife joined us. The worker, trying to be nice remarked that the Burberry perfumes we gave, as a gift, to my aunt-in-law had smelled wonderful; he had never smelt anything like it. All but my uncle enjoyed the encounter, which resulted in my uncle reprimanding him and telling him to get back to work and essentially not attempt to communicate with us. Personally, a part of me was embarrassed for him; another part was repulsed by this colonial ideal. Moreover, while we did engage the worker in conversation many times afterwards, it was very awkward for my Dutch husband who simply found the post-colonial mindset very uncomfortable. The irony is not on me. He spent lots of time moderating and self-censoring himself when in contact with the workers.
It was while sitting at the Innovation session I drew some analogy of this encounter with the Facebook model and began thinking of nature’s examples and how they can be used as a foundation for design. I began to think, that while this grotesque post-colonial model endured for generations, it might hold cues for how a Privacy and Security model can be re-designed to maintain more desirable and realistic definitions of what friendship could look like.
Adopting this colonial model could allow some insight into controlling the level of distancing and exposure of their “friends” to each other, as well as the degrees of access to themselves. This “House access” and access to people should be very much the same as understanding the wider community access and spoke to me as a model upon which Facebook could have built a better system altogether.
I subsequently closed my Facebook account because of the inability to define clearly virtual boundaries with my “friends.” The idea that my boss could be in the same virtual room as my precocious 14-year-old cousin and my not-so-politically correct uncle was rather disturbing. Essentially, if I threw a party I would be horrified if they were all together. The full extent of my life was exposed with little control over my privacy and security.
Adopting a model seen in nature (the House access), though not Biological in the true sense, was the first inkling of how we can begin to look outside the realm of known design patterns to think about design solutions that can sustain over time.
As I neared the completion of this book, Google launched Google Circles, a social network solution that takes into consideration some of the shortcomings of Facebook. This includes such features as warnings when information shared within small circles re-shared outside the initial circle. Second the ability to create small circles of networks; third, the ability to create richer definitions of friendships so that not all “friends” hold the same degree and level of importance to you as the nexus of your own circles.
Undoubtedly, as we learn about the true nature of networks, an ultimate solution will evolve that suits the virtual renditions of friendships.
***End Sidebar***
Medium Blog for more