Jacquelyn Burkell, PhD
FIMS,
The University of Western Ontario
“If you are a young adult or
teenager, you can’t live without
Facebook.”
(Tsjeng, 2010).
‘No Facebook’ could be the
equivalent of social suicide
College Candy September, 2009
‘No Facebook’ could be the
equivalent of social suicide
“[I don’t] trust people who aren’t on
Facebook”, since “Facebook is at the
epicenter of our generation’s world”,
and “anyone who isn’t on there is
weird”.
College Candy September, 2009
The plaintiff’s testimony on discovery was
that he maintained privacy over
communications with his friends that
numbered approximately 200 although only
five of them were close friends. In other
words, he permits some 200 “friends” to
view what he now asserts is private. This is a
preposterous assertion especially given his
testimony that only five of the 200 are close
friends.
Frangione v. Vandongen et al., 2010 ONSC 2823 (CanLII)
The plaintiff could not have a serious
expectation of privacy given that 366
people have been granted access to the
private site.
Murphy v. Perger [2007] O.J. No. 5511(S.J.C.) (QL)
Do Facebook users have a
subjective expectation of
privacy in the information
they post online?
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What kind of information is posted?
Who is the intended/expected audience for
information posted to online social networks?
When and how is the personal information of
other social network users is examined and
shared?
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Older, professional
Small list of friends, limited to strong realworld connections
Careful selection of online posts and
monitoring of online presence
Limited revelation of ‘personal’ information in
online profiles
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Tend to be younger
Large and growing friends list
‘Friends’ include many peripheral social
connections
Profiles include a wide range of information
about self, social activities, etc.
Acknowledgement that there might be reason
to delete information ‘in the future’
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On Facebook she looks happy, she changes her
profile picture, like, five time a day, changes
her status fives times a day. And, she’s fake.
She’s fake on Facebook. So I don’t think people
are honest.
(Ben, male, 18, student)
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“Maybe they just want people to, like, think
they’re cool or something. They want people to
view them in a certain way and they want to
define how people are going to view them.”
 (D. March 8th)
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I have like four pictures of myself on Facebook.
And it's all pictures where I'm in a very
neutral, uh, situation. And I'm very conscious
about which pictures are on Facebook.
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“I think what I put on Facebook is just like just
what I think is really clever.”
 (LW, March 8th)
I feel like a friends list is, those are the people that
you’re open to communicating with.
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So I try to keep it around 400, but each of those
400 I definitely actually made the effort to stay
in touch with. Some closest friends more than
others but I still want to stay in touch because I
want to keep them as friends and actually be
friends – not just in name only
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At a recent party, Maya (18, student) met three
people, friends of someone she already knew.
She decided to add them to her Facebook
friends so she can “talk to them later, share
with them, even though I’ve only met them
once.”
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Sam (male, 18, student) regularly ‘prunes’ his
friends list: “If I think they are people I’m never
going to talk to again, people that I’m just not
that interested in hearing about, then I’ll prune
the list.”
Well I feel like on Facebook the privacy
settings – when you’re doing that you’re
thinking like “Oh no one can see this” but at
the same time all of your friends that you have
can see it and who knows who is with them.
… because you never know who’s around or
where they left their Facebook up or
something.
(Denise, female, 18)
So I think people have to realize that anything
they post on Facebook, people can take a ‘print
screen’ – it can be eventually shared with a
very large audience that it wasn’t intended to
be shared with….
(Manny, male, 18)
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it’s a small world definitely. I’m from Ottawa
and there is people here that know people from
Ottawa. So there could be an employer… their
daughter knows you somehow so you can still
see it that way. Or there is always a way that
they can find it. … you can’t control it.
Oh, yeah. All us girls do it all the time. Like, our
groups of friends… I think somebody got married,
and we’re like ‘Ohhh, wedding photos!’ And we
were trying to find them but … only one of us had
them as a friend so we just went on their Facebook
and looked at all the wedding photos… they posted
it amongst all their friends, so they should be
comfortable with a friend of a friend being able to
see it.
Belinda, 20, professional
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I have a deal with my aunts and uncles that if I see
something … like my cousin for example talking
about blow jobs when she was fourteen… that I
would bring it up to their parents and be like “By
the way, this is what’s on Facebook”…. If they want
to hide it from mom and dad, it’s one thing. But if
they want to post it for the entire world to see,
thinking that they’re still hiding it from mom and
dad, you know, that’s a different situation.
Fern, 30s, professional
…you choose to put that information
knowing that anyone can access it and do
anything they want with it. I don’t mean
this harshly, but they kinda had it coming
to them. Because if you don’t want people
to know that or share it then don’t put it
out there …
Facebook is really for people stalking other
people. I guess even using that system I
suppose you have to be aware of it and most
people, without the highest possible privacy
settings, have to be comfortable with it to
some degree to find people, find pictures –
find stuff about you, the self identifying stuff
about you, and if they’re bored there are all
sorts of other things
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Selected and ‘produced’ for public consumption
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Projecting an ‘image’
Assumed to be available to a wide and not clearly
delineated audience
‘Everyone’ has access
 Information is ‘public’
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Shared with others, even those without direct
access to the profile
Creeping/Lurking/Stalking
 ‘Over the shoulder’ access
 ‘Friend of a friend’ access
 Sharing passwords
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NO
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Family (especially parents), employers,
‘strangers’
Malicious use
‘Sensitive’ information
Explicit signals
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Deleted information
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Intended for social purposes
Distributed to a broad and loosely defined
social network
Shared within and beyond that network for
social purposes
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Can have negative consequences
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Ryerson student disciplined for Facebook study
group
Student teacher denied job because of ‘Drunken
Pirate’ photo on Facebook page
Waitress loses job after Facebook rant about ‘cheap’
customer
Users want and need to socialize, and they
act in privacy-risking ways because of it. We
cannot and should not beat these social urges
out of people; we cannot and should not stop
people from acting on them. We can and
should help them understand the
consequences of their socializing, make
available safer ways to do it, and protect
them from sociality hijackers.
Grimmelmann, 2009
If the police have no wiretap on your phone
today, they cannot turn back the clock and
recover a conversation if you become a suspect
next month. That is not the case with electronic
transmissions, which generally are stored by
Internet service providers, archived by search
engines, and documented in cookies and Web
histories by default.
Tufecki, 2008
When my story is re-told on the basis of
biological memory, there is some natural limit to
the ‘facts’ available for the reconstruction. In
contrast, if you were smart enough, determined
enough, and persistent enough, you could create
an almost minute-by-minute reconstruction of
my digital life – fodder for re-telling of an
entirely different order.
Burkell, 2011
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Users want and need to socialize
They act in privacy-risking ways because of it
We cannot and should not stop people from
acting on these desires
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Users want and need to socialize
They act in privacy-risking ways because of it
We cannot and should not stop people from acting
on these desires
We can and should help them understand the
consequences of their socializing
Make available safer ways to do it
Protect them from sociality hijackers.
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Understandable, readable, appropriate privacy
policies (Burkell et al., 2007)
Education, education, education
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Understandable, readable, appropriate privacy
policies (Burkell et al., 2007)
Education, education, education
A ‘right to be forgotten’?
Prohibited grounds?
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A ‘right to be forgotten’ will help people
better manage data protection risks online:
people will be able to delete their data if
there are no legitimate grounds for retaining
it.
(new provision in EU data protection rules)
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Individuals are protected from action against
them on the basis of their online information,
unless the information reveals criminal or
unethical conduct or has caused significant
harm.
Individuals have a right to rebut online
information if it is to be used against them.
Online information must be supported by offline information if it is to be used against
individuals.

Levin, 2012
Thanks to the Office of the Privacy
Commissioner of Canada for supporting
this project through the Contributions
Program