A couple of months ago, a friend of mine asked on Facebook:
Do you think that facebook tracks the stuff that people type and then erase before hitting? (or the “post” button)
Good question.
We spend a lot of time thinking about what to post on Facebook.
Should you argue that political point your high school friend made? Do
your friends really want to see yet another photo of your cat (or baby)?
Most of us have, at one time or another, started writing something and
then, probably wisely, changed our minds.
Unfortunately, the code that powers Facebook still knows what you
typed—even if you decide not to publish it. It turns out that the things
you explicitly choose not to share aren't entirely private.
Facebook calls these unposted thoughts "self-censorship," and
insights into how it collects these nonposts can be found in a recent
paper written by two Facebookers. Sauvik Das, a Ph.D. student at
Carnegie Mellon and summer software engineer intern at Facebook, and
Adam Kramer, a Facebook data scientist, have put online an article
presenting their study of the self-censorship behavior collected
from 5 million English-speaking Facebook users. It reveals a lot about
how Facebook monitors our unshared thoughts and what it thinks about
them.
The study examined aborted status updates, posts on other people's
timelines, and comments on others' posts. To collect the text you type,
Facebook sends code to your browser. That code automatically analyzes
what you type into any text box and reports metadata back to Facebook.
Storing text as you type isn't uncommon on other websites. For
example, if you use Gmail, your draft messages are automatically saved
as you type them. Even if you close the browser without saving, you can
usually find a (nearly) complete copy of the email you were typing in
your Drafts folder. Facebook is using essentially the same technology
here. The difference is that Google is saving your messages to help you.
Facebook users don't expect their unposted thoughts to be collected,
nor do they benefit from it.
It is not clear to the average reader how this data collection is covered by Facebook's privacy policy. In Facebook’s Data Use Policy, under a section called "Information we receive and how it is used,"
it’s made clear that the company collects information you choose to
share or when you "view or otherwise interact with things.” But nothing
suggests that it collects content you explicitly don’t share.
Typing and deleting text in a box could be considered a type of
interaction, but I suspect very few of us would expect that data to be
saved. When I reached out to Facebook, a representative told me that the
company believes this self-censorship is a type of interaction covered
by the policy.
In their article, Das and Kramer claim to only send back information to Facebook that indicates whether you self-censored, not what you
typed. The Facebook rep I spoke with agreed that the company isn’t
collecting the text of self-censored posts. But it’s certainly
technologically possible, and it’s clear that Facebook is interested in
the content of your self-censored posts. Das and Kramer’s article closes
with the following: "we have arrived at a better understanding of how
and where self-censorship manifests on social media; next, we will need
to better understand what and why." This implies that Facebook wants to
know what you are typing in order to understand it. The same code
Facebook uses to check for self-censorship can tell the company what you
typed, so the technology exists to collect that data it wants right
now.
It is easy to connect this to all the recent news about NSA
surveillance. On the surface, it's similar enough. An organization is
collecting metadata—that is, everything but the content of a
communication—and analyzing it to understand people's behavior. However,
there are some important differences. While it may be uncomfortable
that the NSA has access to our private communications, the agency is are
monitoring things we have actually put online. Facebook, on the other
hand, is analyzing thoughts that we have intentionally chosen not to share.
This may be closer to the recent revelation that the FBI can turn on a computer's webcam without
activating the indicator light to monitor criminals. People surveilled
through their computers’ cameras aren’t choosing to share video of
themselves, just as people who self-censor on Facebook aren’t choosing
to share their thoughts. The difference is that the FBI needs a warrant
but Facebook can proceed without permission from anyone.
Why does Facebook care anyway? Das and Kramer argue that
self-censorship can be bad because it withholds valuable information. If
someone chooses not to post, they claim, "[Facebook] loses value from
the lack of content generation." After all, Facebook shows you ads based
on what you post. Furthermore, they argue that it’s not fair if someone
decides not to post because he doesn't want to spam his hundreds of
friends—a few people could be interested in the message. "Consider, for
example, the college student who wants to promote a social event for a
special interest group, but does not for fear of spamming his other
friends—some of who may, in fact, appreciate his efforts,” they write.
This paternalistic view isn’t abstract. Facebook studies this because
the more its engineers understand about self-censorship, the more
precisely they can fine-tune their system to minimize self-censorship’s
prevalence. This goal—designing Facebook to decrease self-censorship—is
explicit in the paper.
So Facebook considers your thoughtful discretion about what to post
as bad, because it withholds value from Facebook and from other users.
Facebook monitors those unposted thoughts to better understand them, in
order to build a system that minimizes this deliberate behavior. This
feels dangerously close to “ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN,” a motto of the eponymous dystopian Internet company in Dave Eggers’ recent novel The Circle.
This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.
Jennifer Golbeck is director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and an associate professor at the University of Maryland.
Jennifer Golbeck is director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and an associate professor at the University of Maryland.
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