"It's been one week since my last confession..."
There are few greater or more powerful acts of confession in this world than the keeping of a private diary. We all need a place to confide our innermost thoughts, our fears and our doubts, our hopes and our dreams...a place to safely explore all of the weird and vulnerable and amazing things that make us human. I've kept one – however intermittently – since I was a young man, in a series of physical notebooks which remain on my bookshelves to this day, all in various states of completion, each marking a chapter of my life that I'll not soon forget.
In recent years, journalling for me has become an almost exclusively digital process, with the main body of my now truly voluminous archives occupying only a tiny portion of my computer's hard drive. The benefits are obvious, but the drawbacks are slightly more difficult to quantify, arising somewhat paradoxically from the fact that making them easier to manage has somehow made them more difficult to reference, even (or perhaps especially) in the abstract. They do, however, have one thing very important thing in common: the possibility of their discovery, with the question of “by whom?” having any number of different and uncomfortable answers. Although up until now, I had never had occasion to suspect that Facebook might be one of them.
First, a little background: recently, I was given pause to reflect back on a particular defining event of my life in my journal, one that I had not explored in such a fashion previously. You'll forgive in advance my declining to discuss the details overmuch with you, Dear Reader; it's a fairly personal matter, and is only relevant insofar as what the experience of writing it out led to afterwards. Suffice it to say that the entry in question involved discussing persons who were of great importance to me at that time, one of whom I haven't spoken to in many years. We're still on friendly terms, but have long since drifted into separate lives with differing priorities, as friends so often do. Linked by social media, we're just a click or two away from one another, but Facebook's filtering mechanisms enforce our divide as much as our own apathy towards closing it ever could.
So imagine my surprise when, a mere hour or two after writing this private, unshared journal entry, this old friend, whom I've not been in contact with in any way, shape, or form for at least four years, suddenly appeared on my Facebook page, leaving a comment on a post that, however tenuously, was linked to the subject I had just been writing about. Given the circumstances, this hardly seemed coincidental.
Obviously, the claim that Facebook (or any other social media site, for that matter) is accessing specific contents of my hard drives (or anyone else's, for that matter) requires an exceptional burden of proof, one I have thus far been unable to obtain. Hours of research proved inconclusive as to what manner of information Facebook collects from its users beyond what they voluntarily provide in accordance with the site's Data Use Policy, which consists mainly of performance analytics and identification information used to enhance the user experience. What can be confirmed is that Facebook, like many other websites, installs cookies and othermonitoring tools to this achieve this end; the specific nature and scope of the data they collect, however, is anybody's guess.
So what next, then, but to ask Facebook directly for their archives of my personal data? Surely, it could tell me something. This delightful little placebo, clearly intended to pacify the rubes into swallowing their privacy concerns, is surprisingly easy and quick to accomplish, and does in fact provide a wide array of information that you don't normally have access to: session history across devices, topics used for targeted advertising, and IP addresses you've logged in from, just to name a few. I must profess, sifting through the assemblage of data I was very quickly provided (it only took a few moments for Facebook to prepare and deliver my information; a mark of suspicion, if there ever was one) was an interesting experience, and showed me a number of things I did not know about my interactions with the website. Yet, my still-unanswered question looms, casting a lurid glow across the social media landscape: is Facebook reading my diary? If so, what can I do about it?
It's hard not to assume that the answer lies in what Facebook isn't telling us. In 2011, Miranda Miller of the website Search Engine Watch released a report called “Your Facebook Data File: Everything You Never Wanted Anyone to Know,” in which they detailed the differences between “personally requested vs. legally requested” data archives:
“A group of Austrian students called Europe v. Facebook recently got their hands on their complete Facebook user data files – note, this is not the same file Facebook sends if you request your personal history through the webform in Account Settings...the complete user file they received when requested through Section 4 DPA + Art. 12 Directive 95/46/EG is the same one available to attorneys and law enforcement via court order. It contains more information than the one Facebook sends users through their webform...
Judging by the sheer difference in file sizes, comparing the personally requested vs. legally requested files (Europe v. Facebook founder Max) Schrems and Europe v. Facebook received, there’s a lot of data left on the table. For the same user, the file sizes varied enormously. Schrems described the file obtained through a legal request as a 500MB PDF including data the user thought they had deleted. The one sent through a regular Facebook request was a 150MB HTML file and included video (the PDF did not) but did not have the deleted data.”
One can only speculate what that 350MB discrepancy is consists of, beyond what Search Engine Watch's report outlines. However, one thing is clear: whatever manner of analytics and research Facebook is conducting, it's considerably more exhaustive (and likely much more evasive) than they're letting on.
More importantly, they don't have to; not under U.S. law anyway, short of a court order. Dan Tyman of PC World, writing concurrently on the story, had this to say on the matter:
“To request your Facebook file you have to provide a scan of a government-issued ID, as well as your mailing address, phone number, the email address you use to log on to Facebook, your correct birth date (it has to match the one on your Facebook account – so no more lying about your age), and the law under which you are requesting the data. That last one is going to be tough for US members, since there are no laws requiring companies like Facebook disclose this information to ordinary citizens.”
"...the Panopticon must not be understood
as a dream building: it is the diagram of a
mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form."
- Michel Focault
With no other apparent options, Tyman cited the U.S. Constitution. It turns out even America's holiest of holies was insufficient to the task. “Just got a robo-email saying Facebook won't comply with my request, 'as this form is only applicable in certain jurisdictions,'” Tyman updated the post to say a short while time later. As of this time, it appears that the rules have yet to change. Miller's sardonic prediction – that most people will never see this information until the moment it is used against them in a court of law – does indeed leave very little to the imagination.
In the 21st century, utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham's 18th-century vision of the “Inspection-House” has been all but fully realized: a digital Panopticon of staggering proportions exists online in the form of social media, where millions of users spend billions of hours under the watchful eye of omniscient, omnipresent information brokers, with sites like Facebook leading the charge toward an era of unprecedented and radical social transparency. “Visibility is a trap,” wrote Bentham's contemporary adversary Michel Focault in response to the Bentham's grandiose ideas, one that it appears we've all taken the sad pleasure of falling into into. Meanwhile, my old, handwritten journals never looked so good, and I think it's time I take my diary elsewhere...just in case.