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It Turns Out We've Been Concerned About Facebook's Privacy Since The Beginning

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After more than a year of non-stop privacy scandals involving Facebook, it seems not a month goes by without some new story emerging about the company’s misuse of our personal data. This raises the question of whether our conversation about Facebook and privacy is something new, born of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or whether the events of last year simply brought the dormant issue of privacy back into the global conversation?

The timeline below shows the percentage of worldwide online news coverage in the 65 languages monitored by the GDELT Project that mentioned “Facebook” at least twice in the article, along with the word “privacy,” since January 2017 (the start of the data). It combines this with the percentage of television airtime on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News monitored by the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive that mentioned the two words within 15 seconds of each other. Since online and television news operate at different scales, the timeline displays them as standard deviations from mean (Z-scores), which allows them to be displayed on the same graph.

Kalev Leetaru

Privacy issues involving Facebook received almost no mentions on television in 2017, while online media covered them only sparingly. Cambridge Analytica brought the topic roaring into both mediums in March 2018, though online media quickly moved on, while television news remained fixated with the topic through July.

The biggest day of coverage actually came from Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony, while the second biggest was this past December when news of Facebook’s partnerships program broke.

Media attention has remained elevated in the year since the Cambridge Analytica story, with around double the typical daily volume of stories discussing Facebook and privacy.

Mark Zuckerberg has seen his global media profile increasingly linked with privacy. The timeline below shows the percentage of worldwide online news coverage since January 2017 mentioning him that also mentioned privacy. From under 10% of daily stories throughout 2017 to 60% at the peak of the Cambridge Analytica story, he managed to steadily distance himself from the topic through August 2018. As of September 2018 the steady drumbeat of new privacy stories emerging has steadily cemented his name more and more with his role in defining our digital rights.

Kalev Leetaru

The lack of privacy conversation in 2017 might at first glance suggest Cambridge Analytica finally forced a long-overdue societal reckoning around privacy.

Instead, it masks the fact that privacy was once a central concern with the platform, but we eventually accepted Facebook’s rewriting of our privacy norms and stopped talking about it.

The timeline below shows the percentage of television airtime on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News back to June 2009 that mentioned Facebook and privacy. Here we can see the early period of Facebook’s life was dominated by a near-constant barrage of privacy stories.

Something changed in early 2015: we stopped talking about Facebook’s privacy implications.

This continued for three whole years of minimal attention until Cambridge Analytica brought the topic roaring back into the global privacy conversation.

Kalev Leetaru

It is fascinating to look back on how much we used to talk about Facebook’s upending of our online privacy norms and how abruptly this conversation ended with society at large simply accepting Facebook’s redefinition of our digital rights.

News articles from that early period of privacy reckoning could have been written today. The Atlantic wrote in 2010 that “People don't like Facebook because people don't like feeling harvested. We don't like formerly private information turned public; or companies scraping through profiles; or a CEO joking about our gullibility.” In a warning that could have been ripped from today, it offers “Facebook users see Facebook as a yearbook. Facebook executives see Facebook as an information reservoir. We want a privacy policy that's fixed. They want a privacy policy that molds to the contours of the company's evolving business model.”

Amazingly, by 2010 Facebook had already undergone much of the privacy evolution we are still grappling with nearly a decade later. As the Atlantic put it back then, “Facebook information used to be public only within your friends circle. Then that public network expanded to include anybody at your school or company. Then it expanded to include your geographical network. Then the circle grew to include the entire Internet. Finally, Facebook designed a new protocol to share Facebook information with sites like Yelp and Pandora to personalize our browsing experience on the Web. Now Facebookers are starting to feel less like ‘the users’ and more like ‘the used.’”

CNN warned at the time that despite there being “much uproar online about Facebook's alleged lack of concern for the privacy of its users' personal information” and it being “clear that some people have become so upset that they're leaving the networking site, which has more than 400 million members,” the defections weren’t likely to lead to a stampede away, as “the account deletions likely aren't numerous enough to affect the site's overall size.” A Facebook spokesperson even noted at the time that the site had actually added another 10 million active users during the privacy uproar, much as it has continued growing over the past year during its most recent flurry of privacy stories.

Media attention to privacy is one thing, but what about user interest in their rights? Are Facebook’s users more concerned about privacy that they were in the past?

The timeline below shows worldwide English-language search interest in Facebook and Facebook together with privacy via Google Trends since January 2004. Since Facebook privacy-related searches are almost imperceptible compared to the total volume of all Facebook searches, the graph reports the two as standard deviations from the mean (Z-scores).

Facebook’s meteoric rise into the public consciousness over 2008-2009 can be clearly seen. Intriguingly, search interest regarding Facebook’s privacy implications rose almost in lockstep, showing how the platform’s privacy stance was a worry from its beginning. Overall, searches about Facebook privacy have been trending steadily downwards since 2013 but follow an overall reduction in searches about the platform, likely due to its users increasingly consuming the digital world through its walled garden rather than external search engines. This worryingly means Facebook is increasingly dictating the conversation around its privacy policies.

Sadly, the greatest search attention ever paid to privacy on Facebook was in September 2015 with a viral hoax claiming users could copy and paste a legal statement into their profiles to deny Facebook the right to mine their data. Though even the virality of that hoax didn’t bring us back to talking about privacy.

Kalev Leetaru

Putting this all together, we can see that privacy has been major concern almost from the beginning of Facebook’s rise and once accounted for a steady daily drumbeat of media coverage about the company. We stopped talking about Facebook privacy in early 2015 and for three years largely just accepted the company’s every attack on our digital rights. Cambridge Analytica therefore did not start the privacy conversation, it merely resumed it from where it left off three years ago. The almost identical wording of news coverage from a decade ago about Facebook’s privacy missteps and the platform’s similar ability to continue growing in the midst of non-stop privacy stories suggests it will likely have little trouble overcoming the past year’s stories.

In the end, it seems Facebook’s greatest contribution to society really has been the death of privacy.