4 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1089-7801/10/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING
All Systems Go
From the Editor in Chief…
I n 2008, I published a column about identi­ties, including a brief discussion about how I sometimes turn to social networks such as
LinkedIn or Facebook to find people because
their information in the social network tends to
be more current and reliable than their “home­
pages.”1 I also mentioned an old acquaintance
who seemed to have simply “fallen off the grid”
and become unreachable through the usual
methods. Given some recent experiences and
articles in the media, I thought it a good time to
revisit this topic.
Social networks have become ubiquitous.
When I briefly encountered someone I hadn’t
seen in some time, and later wanted to look
him up, Facebook seemed like the logical place
to turn. Our status as ever­connected “friends”
would make posting a friendly note on his wall
simple. Yet, try as I might, I just couldn’t find
him in my friend directory. My first reaction
was that he had (gasp!) “unfriended” me — per­
haps we didn’t interact enough, or perhaps he
was dropping friends to improve the signal­
to­noise ratio in his news feed. But I couldn’t
find him on Facebook at all. So either he had
both unfriended me and set his account to be
unsearchable, or he had left Facebook.
I resorted to old­fashioned email. It turned
out that he had indeed closed his Facebook
account due to a combination of not using it
much and concerns over privacy. He sent me a
link to an MSNBC article entitled “Details of 100
Million Facebook Users Published Online” (www.
msnbc.msn.com/id/38463013/ns/technology
_and_science­security), which discussed how
an online security consultant crawled public
Facebook data and made a single compendium
of users’ profile data. The article pointed out that
this snapshot essentially ensured that any data
a user previously kept public and subsequently
protected would always stay public.
Problem? Not in my book. With the creation
of the “Wayback Machine” (www.archive.org/
web/web.php) years ago — a website that crawls
and archives webpages and allows users to view
webpages as of a point in time in the past —
social network data isn’t the only information
that can take on a life of its own; any data on
the Web that was ever public is presumed to
be accessible indefinitely. If someone put their
birthday publicly in their Facebook profile and
thought better of it later, the damage has really
already been done. It’s not reasonable to com­
plain to either Facebook management or the
people who collect these snapshots and argue
that they invaded users’ privacy — these users
made the information public! (Of course, if you
limit access to your birthday or other personal
information to friends only, that data shouldn’t
turn up in a public snapshot, right? Right.)
The Element of Surprise
My acquaintance is neither the first person I
know to abandon Facebook nor the first exam­
ple of a social network link withering away. The
problem for me isn’t that my connections might
decide to leave either our personal link or the
entire system, but rather the subterfuge with
which it happens. Social networks like Facebook
and LinkedIn are really geared toward establish­
ing connections: notifying users when others
ask them to connect with them, when invitees
accept their invitations, and when they might be
acquainted with other users they aren’t currently
linked to. But these same networks are really
bad, perhaps intentionally, at notifying users
about the reverse … but why? When I posted
political content on Facebook during the 2008
US election, one of my “friends” quietly dropped
me rather than see my posts. As in the case I
described earlier, I noticed this only by accident.
But, in this case, I could see the account existed,
so I was clearly removed by design. (I should add
that I was reinstated, along with a few others,
when the person learned there were other ways
to tone down our impact on his feed.)
Closing the Open (Face) Book
Fred Douglis • EMC • f.douglis@computer.org