This article was downloaded by: [Masarykova Univerzita v Brne], [Tae-Sik Kim]
On: 30 June 2014, At: 03:34
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Information, Communication & Society
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rics20
Facebook: public space, or private
space?
Jacquelyn Burkell
a
, Alexandre Fortier
a
, Lorraine (Lola) Yeung
Cheryl Wong
a
& Jennifer Lynn Simpson
b
a
Faculty of Information and Media Studies, The University of
Western Ontario, North Campus Building, London, ON N6A 5B7,
Canada
b
Faculty of Law, The University of Western Ontario, 1151
Richmond Street, London, ON N6A 3K7, Canada
Published online: 02 Jan 2014.
To cite this article: Jacquelyn Burkell, Alexandre Fortier, Lorraine (Lola) Yeung Cheryl Wong
& Jennifer Lynn Simpson (2014): Facebook: public space, or private space?, Information,
Communication & Society, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2013.870591
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.870591
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
Downloadedby[MasarykovaUniverzitavBrne],[Tae-SikKim]at03:3430June2014
Facebook: public space, or private space?
Jacquelyn Burkella*, Alexandre Fortiera
, Lorraine (Lola) Yeung Cheryl Wonga
and
Jennifer Lynn Simpsonb
a
Faculty of Information and Media Studies, The University of Western Ontario, North Campus Building,
London, ON N6A 5B7, Canada; b
Faculty of Law, The University of Western Ontario, 1151 Richmond Street,
London, ON N6A 3K7, Canada
(Received 30 March 2013; accepted 25 November 2013)
Social networks have become a central feature of everyday life. Most young people are
members of at least one online social network, and they naturally provide a great deal of
personal information as a condition for participation in the rich online social lives these
networks afford. Increasingly, this information is being used as evidence in criminal and
even civil legal proceedings. These latter uses, by actors involved in the justice system, are
typically justiﬁed on the grounds that social network information is essentially public in
nature, and thus does not generate a subjective expectation of privacy necessary to support a
civil rights-based privacy protection. This justiﬁcation, however, is based on the perceptions
of individuals who are outside the online social network community, rather than reﬂecting
the norms and privacy practices of participants in online social networks. This project takes
a user-centric approach to the question of whether online social spaces are public venues,
examining of the information-related practices of social network participants, focusing on
how they treat their own information and that of others posted in online social spaces. Our
results reveal that online social spaces are indeed loci of public display rather than private
revelation: online proﬁles are structured with the view that ‘everyone’ can see them, even if
the explicitly intended audience is more limited. These social norms are inconsistent with
the claim that social media are private spaces; instead, it appears that participants view and
treat online social networks as public venues.
Keywords: privacy; social media; Facebook
‘If you are a young adult or teenager, you can’t live without Facebook’. (Tsjeng, 2010)
This headline, appearing in the online version of the Guardian on 21 March 2010, pretty much
reﬂects the status of social networking in the lives of many teenagers and young adults. According
to the author, and consistent with other reports (Vaughan-Nichols, 2013), Facebook, the most
widely used among social networking sites, is the ﬁrst site that users go to when they turn on
their computer, serving as (among other things) a social calendar (and event manager), communications
channel (allowing users to keep in touch with friends and family), and shareable photo
album. The large majority of teens and young adults maintain social network proﬁles: recent
American data, for example, indicate that 87% of youth and young adults aged 18–29 use
social networking sites (Rainie, Lenhart, & Smith, 2012). Users perform a variety of social
© 2013 Taylor & Francis
*Corresponding author. Email: jburkell@uwo.ca
Information, Communication & Society, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.870591
Downloadedby[MasarykovaUniverzitavBrne],[Tae-SikKim]at03:3430June2014
functions on networking sites, including maintaining and updating their online proﬁles, sending
directed messages (to individuals or groups), posting semi-public comments to friends’ walls
(visible to anyone with access to the proﬁle), commenting on photographs, and joining social
groups (Joinson, 2008).
Online social networks are all about the sharing of personal information, so it is not surprising
that participants reveal a great deal about themselves in their online proﬁles (see, e.g. Gross &
Acquisti, 2005). This information sharing occurs in the context of online social networks that
are typically much more extensive than their ofﬂine counterparts, including large numbers of
‘weak ties’ (in the context of Facebook these are colloquially termed ‘Facebook friends’) with
whom the participants neither have nor anticipate extensive interaction in the face-to-face
world (Lewis & West, 2009). The apparently proﬂigate self-revelation of online social network
participants might suggest that they are unconcerned about privacy in these social environments.
At the same time, however, participants in social networks report deploying different site features
or aspects to tailor the visibility of their online actions and productions (Thelwall & Wilkinson,
2010; see also Carey and Burkell, 2009 for privacy protecting strategies used in the online
environment), and members of various social networking sites indicate that they employ
privacy settings to limit access to their proﬁles (Lange, 2007; Patchin & Hinduja, 2010).
What quickly becomes evident is that social networking sites are neither prototypically
‘private’ nor obviously ‘public’. Instead, online social networks appear to be emerging social
spaces that occupy a liminal territory between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ (e.g. Lee, 2009; boyd 2007)
has used the term ‘networked publics’ to refer to the permeable and somewhat ﬂuid audience
for online social proﬁles, and see Gelman, 2009, for a discussion of how information that is
not formally public is accessed by ‘blurry-edged’ networks of interested others). We do not
know quite how to think about these technologies and social spaces, we do not know quite
how to behave within them, and, critically, we do not understand the social norms regarding disclosure
and sharing in these spaces (see Häkkilä & Chatﬁeld (2005) and Viégas (2005) for
research that documents the development of new social norms in various digital environments;
see also Grimmelmann, 2009, for a discussion of the importance of understanding social
values in these new venues in order to craft appropriate regulatory responses). We have to
look to community practices to determine whether social networks are public or private spaces.
This question has heightened urgency because, increasingly, information posted on social networks
is entering into the legal process (e.g. as submissions in criminal proceedings, administrative
proceedings, and, in some jurisdictions, civil proceedings). As a result, courts in many
jurisdictions struggle with the question of admissibility. In some spheres this includes considering
whether there is a subjective expectation of privacy by the individual, as required under judicial
law and tests for the court. The relevant considerations are difﬁcult enough in the familiar world
of physical bodies, physical objects, and physically deﬁned territories. They become more challenging
when the privacy in question refers to entirely new forms of personal and social spaces for
which social norms are, at best, developing (see, for example, Barnes, 2006, and Debatin,
Lovejoy, Horn, & Hughes, 2009).
Courts are tackling the difﬁcult question of whether and to what extent online proﬁles (in current
practice usually Facebook proﬁles) are discoverable for the purposes of civil action. Section 8 of the
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protects against ‘unreasonable search and
seizure’, governs the admissibility of social networking proﬁles in administrative and criminal
cases, and the discoverability of these proﬁles in civil actions is evaluated in light of Charter
values (Park v. Mullin, 2005). Prior decisions on Section 8 of the Charter (R. v. Tessling, 2004)
have made it clear that the standard is not merely descriptive, as this approach would involve an
inevitable erosion of personal privacy: instead, it is viewed as a normative standard that fosters
‘the underlying values of dignity, integrity and autonomy’, protecting a ‘biographical core of
2 J. Burkell et al.
Downloadedby[MasarykovaUniverzitavBrne],[Tae-SikKim]at03:3430June2014
personal information’ which would ‘tend to reveal intimate details of the lifestyle and personal
choices of the individual’ (R. v. Plant, 1993). At the same time, ‘reasonable expectations’ must
take account of the ‘totality of the circumstances’, including (among other factors) whether the individual
can regulate access to the information, and whether it is in ‘public view’.
Although admissibility decisions in civil actions are not strictly governed by the Charter,
Charter values are relevant to these considerations. In practice, the legal reasoning regarding
the admissibility of social network proﬁles seems to focus on, and indeed make assumptions
about, whether posted information is ‘public’. In deciding whether a plaintiff can expect
privacy in her Facebook content, courts rely on several factors such as the social (and therefore
public) nature of Facebook and other networking sites, the number of Facebook friends a user has
and the extent to which the user limits access to her proﬁle through her privacy settings, in order to
infer the degree of privacy that the user must expect in her proﬁle (see e.g. Murphy v. Perger,
2007; Schuster v. Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Company of Canada, 2009; and alluded to
in Sparks v. Dubé, 2011). In Frangione v. Vandongen et al. (2010), for example, the court commented
as follows:
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. In my view, there
would be little or no invasion of the plaintiff’s privacy if the plaintiff were ordered to produce all portions
of his Facebook site.
In this and other similar reasoning, the courts are focusing on the relatively large size of online
social networks, citing this large size as prima facie evidence that information posted to this
network is ‘public’ in nature. It is entirely possible, however, that participants could nonetheless
treat this information as ‘private’ in the sense that social norms preclude sharing this information
outside the original distribution list, or suggest in other ways that the information is ‘private’
rather than ‘public.
Legal scholars have struggled with the issue of privacy in the online environment, working to
map existing privacy law onto this new domain. Much of this scholarship is based in the United
States, relating to privacy torts. Abril (2007), for example, attempts to recast privacy torts in a
‘spaceless world’, suggesting that ‘instead of physical space, we should think in terms of walls
of conﬁdentiality built by technical architecture, agreements, and relational bonds’ (p. 47). Grimmelmann
(2009) examines whether Facebook (and particularly privacy on Facebook) can be
‘saved’ through a strengthened public-disclosure tort along with enhanced options to opt out of
information sharing. Kerr (2010) maps Fourth Amendment principles from physical space to
cyberspace, proposing that the ‘inside/outside’ distinction appropriate for physical space be
replaced, in the context of online communications, with a ‘content/non-content’ distinction,
while Crocker (2009), again in the context of US jurisprudence, proposes that online privacy
rights be protected through a focus on interpersonal liberty. Strahilevitz (2004) suggests that
social network theory offers a ‘relatively objective, testable, rigorous, and principled approach’
to the determination of whether an online disclosure should be considered to be ‘public’.
These and other legal and policy analyses can and should be strengthened by inquiry into the
privacy-related practices and expectations of the reasonable social network participant (Grimmelmann,
2009). In some sense, the courts seem to consider the social nature of online participation,
and thus the shared nature of online proﬁles, as testament to the public nature of line social proﬁles.
Yet personal, and private, information is shared in a wide variety of contexts without ‘crossing
over’ into the public domain (Strahilevitz, 2004). Privacy is not an ‘all or nothing’
proposition, and it is at least possible that a reasonable social network participant might still
Information, Communication & Society 3
Downloadedby[MasarykovaUniverzitavBrne],[Tae-SikKim]at03:3430June2014
expect privacy in her proﬁle, despite the social nature of the site or the possibility that she has a
large number of Facebook friends who have access to the information that she posts. Alternatively,
posting to Facebook might be like going to the bar, providing a social venue for public
display of the ‘produced’ self: a version of the self that is intended precisely for public consumption,
and available to a large and undeﬁned public. It is entirely possible that social network participants
might not perceive information shared in the social networking context as having entered
the public domain, and might instead share with others in the same community a set of standards
and norms that preclude the disclosure of this information outside of the original network of contacts.
The question of whether or to what degree online social spaces are private spaces can really
only be answered by the digital citizens who populate them. This research seeks to ﬁll this gap in
the literature by examining the information-related practices of social network participants. Our
focus is on how people treat their own information and that of others posted in online social
spaces, with particular focus on the question of whether online social environments are public
or private spaces.
What does it mean for information to be ‘public’? The notion of ‘public’ is one for which there
is no explicit deﬁnition, and in practice ‘public’ is often identiﬁed as the antithesis of ‘private
(Tverdek, 2008). Being ‘public’ tends to be ﬁrst and foremost a question of space: something
is considered public if it occurs in a space (real or virtual), where there can be no expectation
of freedom from observation by others. By choosing to act in a space to which others have a
ready access, one surrenders one’s claims to privacy with respect to a potential audience.
Tverdek (2008) argues also that something can lose its private character, and therefore become
public, by virtue of its being revealed to others (whether intentionally or inadvertently). When
we share information, we lose control, and our privacy depends on the conﬁdentiality of that
person (Petronio, 2002). If online social spaces are private spaces, the social norms should
censure sharing of information beyond the original audience, and participants should feel free
to post information they consider to be sensitive in nature. By contrast, if these are public
spaces, ‘re-sharing’ of posted information should be supported and accepted, and participants
should take care to share only that information they intend to be widely shared.
Method
Interviews and focus groups were conducted with active online social network participants,
recruited through advertisements at a large Canadian university. Given the pre-eminence of Facebook
as the most widely used online social network, discussions naturally focused on this social
networking platform, and the report of the results reﬂects that focus. Unstructured interviews and
focus group discussions explored a wide variety of issues related to their practices within social
media, including but not restricted to:
. Their expectations of audiences for their social media proﬁles.
. The content they choose to share on their social media proﬁles.
. Their practices with respect to the dissemination of the content shared by others.
Each session was transcribed and the data were anonymized. Data analysis proceeded using a
grounded theory approach to identify emergent themes.
Subjects
We conducted a total of 10 individual interviews, followed by 5 focus groups (each with between
4 and 7 participants, with a total of 30 focus group participants). The majority of the participants
4 J. Burkell et al.
Downloadedby[MasarykovaUniverzitavBrne],[Tae-SikKim]at03:3430June2014
were female (among the interviewees, 8 females and 2 males; among the focus group participants,
18 females and 12 males). Interview participants ranged in age from late teens to early thirties
(exact ages were not provided), and included undergraduate and graduate students as well as individuals
employed in the health and retail sectors. All focus group participants were students
(including both undergraduate and graduate programs), and they ranged in age from 18 to 42.
Recruitment materials for focus groups and interviews targeted active social network users,
and the majority of the participants ﬁt this category. Among the focus group participants,
however, there were two who were not currently active in any online social networks, although
they had been active users in the past. All other participants classiﬁed themselves as active social
network users; there were, however, obvious differences in the nature of this participation,
perhaps best demonstrated by a short description of individuals who occupied the most
extreme positions on what might be interpreted as a continuum between the most conservative
and least conservative participants in online social spaces.
The number and types of participants in the study varied greatly. Harold (in his thirties) and
Fern (also in her thirties, both healthcare professionals, interview participants) are typical of the
more conservative social network users who participated in the study. As somewhat older individuals
with professional identities, they demonstrated an acute awareness that their online activities
can affect their ofﬂine reputations. Both Harold and Fern maintain a small list of online friends,
limited to individuals with whom they have an ongoing and active ofﬂine connection. They carefully
select their online postings and monitor their online presence to ensure that the proﬁle they
present is professional, and the information they reveal is not too personal in nature. Crystal and
Matt are two younger focus group participants (each in their twenties, focus group participants)
who take an entirely different approach. Each has a large and growing friends list, populated not
only with ‘real world’ friends, but also with acquaintances and ‘friends of friends’ with whom
they have at best a tenuous ofﬂine connection. Similar to many of the younger participants,
Crystal and Matt each recognize that they may in the future chose to further limit their online postings,
perhaps even deleting some material that they have added (or allowed to be added by others)
to their proﬁles; they imagine that this might occur, for example, when they are looking for
employment after they ﬁnish their university degrees. In the meantime, however, their online proﬁles
include a wide variety of information about themselves, their friends, and their social activities,
all intentionally shared with a large and growing network of friends and acquaintances,
including some with whom they have only a tangential face-to-face connection (e.g. ‘friends
of friends’, or people they have encountered once at a party or at a bar). These participants demonstrate
the most extreme of a range of the Facebook-related practices represented in our sample.
Unless explicitly reported otherwise, the results discussed below are characteristic of participants
across the entire range. Where consistent differences are evident between participants with a more
conservative approach (such as Fern and Harold) and those who are less conservative (such as
Crystal and Matt) these differences are discussed explicitly in the text.
Results
Each person who has a Facebook proﬁle maintains a ‘friends’ list, populating that list by asking to
‘friend’ other users and accepting friend requests in return, and by responding to friend requests
initiated by other users. Friends can be deleted (‘unfriended’) at any time by the user. Users have
control, through privacy settings, over the privileges accorded to friends (and, by extension, the
online connections of those friends); previous research suggests, however, that changes to these
default settings are relatively rare (Gross & Acquisti, 2005). By default, each ‘friend’ of a user has
access to the entire Facebook proﬁle including pictures, wall postings, status messages, and any
other information included in the proﬁle; each friend also receives by default automatic updates
Information, Communication & Society 5
Downloadedby[MasarykovaUniverzitavBrne],[Tae-SikKim]at03:3430June2014
(news feeds) regarding changes to the proﬁle. The default setting allows ‘friends of friends’, connected
to the user only through an intermediary who is themselves a Facebook friend, to view the
proﬁle. ‘Friends’ lists are, therefore, an important aspect of privacy control for social network
users, and these lists articulate an audience for online postings.
Some participants have a very open policy when it comes to Facebook friends. Maya (18,
student), for example, admits that she is ‘not very selective’ about friends on Facebook. At a
recent party, for example, she 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.’ Other participants have more limited friends lists, some
including only close real-life friends and family. Sam (male, 18, student) expresses a common
and ‘middle of the road’ criterion when he describes how he ‘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.’ Friends lists can grow to be very large in number
(one participant, whose list was not atypically large, noted that he had reduced his list from
850 to 550 as a result of ‘higher standards’ for friends); even the largest lists, however, consist
of contacts with whom there is some degree of social connection: attendance at the same
school, a meeting at a bar, or an acquaintance in common, for example.
Interview and focus group participants spontaneously and regularly referred to the audience
for their Facebook postings as ‘big’, comprising ‘everyone’, or ‘the whole world’. Thus, for
example, Manny (male, student, 18) notes that if he wants to share something with a ‘bigger audience’,
he posts on Facebook (as opposed to another site); Maya (female, student 18) posts information
as a Facebook status message if she wants ‘everyone to know about it’. Dennis (male,
student, 18) uses Facebook when he does not have a ‘select audience’. Tammy (female,
student, 19) uses ‘Skype or something’ if she is ‘really excited about something’ and does not
want ‘everyone to know about it’, while Facebook is her preferred venue for sharing if she
wants to tell a larger and more general audience. Harold (26) has chosen, for personal reasons,
not to maintain a proﬁle on Facebook. He reports that people approach him saying ‘oh, I know
you’re not on Facebook so I should tell you this’, giving him details about, for example ‘something
personal that happened to someone else that I should know’. His impression is that this
information is shared because he ‘should know it because everyone knows it’. The implication
is obvious: if it is posted on Facebook, then ‘everyone’ does, and should, know about it. In
other words, it is public, at least within a large, loosely deﬁned, and peripherally connected
social circle.
The ‘everyone’ included in this audience appears to be large in number, but the group is not
entirely undeﬁned. In particular, many participants (particularly the younger ones) were reluctant
to add family to their ‘friends’ list, preferring to maintain a semblance of separation between the
social and family spheres. Employers were another important category, and most (but not all) participants
indicated that they would not include employers as Facebook friends. Although acquaintances
and ‘friends of friends’ were often included in Facebook networks, ‘friend’ requests from
complete strangers with whom there was no social connection were generally declined. Taking
into account these practices and the ‘extra-list’ sharing discussed above, it appears that the
typical Facebook audience is a large and ‘burry-edged’ network of socially connected individuals
that is assumed to branch at least to ‘friends of friends’, but that may very well include individuals
who are even more distantly connected.
When asked how they would convey deeply personal information, such as a signiﬁcant
illness, participants were unanimous in their rejection of Facebook postings as a means of communication.
Even those with the most limited ‘friends’ lists indicated that they would share truly
private information through other means: email, telephone, face-to-face conversations, or, in
some cases, private messages on Facebook.
6 J. Burkell et al.
Downloadedby[MasarykovaUniverzitavBrne],[Tae-SikKim]at03:3430June2014
Information that is posted on Facebook appears to be tailored for this broad social audience.
Ben (male, 18, student) does not get into ‘sensitive’ issues on Facebook; another participant
(Yves, male, 28, student) notes that what you post on Facebook is instead ‘tied to the public
image you want to project’. Denise (female, 18, student) feels that on Facebook ‘you can
change it to make people view you in a certain way’, and posters ‘just want people to, like,
think they’re cool or something.’ There is a general sense that the Facebook ‘self’ is not the
real self, but instead Facebook is used to present and even craft a persona:
Yeah, um, that basically like people feel like if, um, if their Facebook looks more exciting and stuff
then they themselves feel more exciting. Then people reciprocate that like their friends and whoever
else that they have on their Friend’s List. (Julie, female 18)
On Facebook she looks happy, she changes her proﬁle picture, like, ﬁve times a day, changes her
status ﬁve times a day. And, she’s fake. She’s fake on Facebook. So I don’t think people are
honest. (Ben, male, 18, student)
Participants rarely reported removing posted information from Facebook, indicating instead
that they carefully considered postings before they appeared on the site. This is not to say their
decisions are always objectively wise, or consistent (in the case of younger participants) with
what a more mature self would choose: among younger participants, for example, images of
drinking and partying (if not too excessive) are essentially de rigueur, although older participants
choose not to post such images and even those who do post such images indicate that they might
choose to delete them in the future. One issue that prompted considerable discussion was the
posting and tagging of pictures by other people. There was general agreement (though not universal
support for the practice) that pictures would be taken at any social event, posted to Facebook,
and ‘tagged’ to identify the individuals who appear and to connect the picture to the online
proﬁle of those individuals. Participants reported regularly and carefully monitoring their online
proﬁles, including these images posted by others that, through tagging, become part of their
online proﬁle. Undesirable images (typically images in which the user ‘looks bad’, but sometimes
images that depict problematic activities) are typically ‘untagged’, thereby breaking the association
between the proﬁle and the image. Rarely, however, is there a request to remove the
image entirely, since such images are generally viewed as ‘belonging’ to the person who posts
them, generally granting that individual control over the distribution of the image. This presentation
of a ‘best’ self, or a self that meets norms for sociability, interests, and attractiveness
makes sense, especially given that many Facebook users report using the social network to get
to know new people, rather than simply maintaining existing connections (Joinson, 2008).
Although access to a Facebook proﬁle is formally controlled by ‘friends’ lists and associated
privacy settings, participants report a number of other practices that extend the audience to whom
online proﬁle information is available. A relatively small number of participants indicated that
they share their Facebook password with others, thereby providing access to all the proﬁles in
their ‘friends’ list to someone who might not otherwise be able to see these proﬁles. This practice
was limited to younger participants with a less conservative approach to Facebook, and passwords
were shared with close friends or partners. Other participants acknowledged accessing proﬁles of
interest (e.g. that of an ex-boyfriend) by using, with permission and under supervision, the
accounts of friends who were Facebook users, and participants reported offering similar access
to their own friends and acquaintances. Participants also acknowledged ‘over the shoulder’
access, in which they browsed with another person or actively watched while someone else
browsed proﬁles in their Facebook network. More rarely, participants discussed surreptitious or
furtive access, using a Facebook account that was inadvertently left open by the owner to
browse associated content, or reading proﬁles browsed by others without acknowledging the
Information, Communication & Society 7
Downloadedby[MasarykovaUniverzitavBrne],[Tae-SikKim]at03:3430June2014
activity. There was also recognition that Facebook content could be saved by those viewing it and
shared on other platforms.
Among these activities, only password sharing and surreptitious access were subject to direct
approbation, and many participants explicitly noted the audience for a posting was not in practice
limited as described by friends lists and privacy settings. The following comments are typical:
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)
The practice of ‘over the shoulder’ browsing was acknowledged by a number of participants,
and appeared to engender little if any negative reaction. When asked whether she has ever tried to
get access to a proﬁle that was closed to her, Belinda (female, employed, twenties) replied:
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. … . if you’re beside the person and they’re on Facebook, and they’re just clicking
through pictures, you’re not going to stand there and look the opposite way. You’re going to be
talking with them and looking at stuff. You sorta have to understand that’s going to happen.
These comments reﬂect both common practice and common understanding: friends share
stuff with friends, including the social network proﬁles of those in their online social network.
Although our interview and focus group participants differed in their practices with respect to
their own online networks and online proﬁles, they were generally consistent regarding the information
posted by others, claiming ‘they should expect that people will talk about it’, and remarking
that if ‘you have three hundred friends … the chances of them passing some information on to
someone about you, even in casual conversation – are probably pretty high’ (Penny, female,
thirties). Thus, there is a general presumption that information shared by others on Facebook is
‘public’ unless there is clear evidence or strong social expectation to the contrary.
Fern, for example (female, thirties, health professional), has her own proﬁle limited so that
only friends can view it. Although she views her own postings as ‘private’ an does not want
them shared beyond her network of Facebook friends, she has a different perspective on the postings
of others in her online social network. In particular, she has an agreement with her aunts and
uncles that she will monitor the Facebook proﬁles of younger cousins, reporting problematic
material to them:
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’.
She reasons that this is appropriate because:
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.
8 J. Burkell et al.
Downloadedby[MasarykovaUniverzitavBrne],[Tae-SikKim]at03:3430June2014
Fern could be accused of having a double standard, expecting her own privacy to be respected
while compromising the privacy of others. But another interpretation is equally valid: Fern
assumes by default that Facebook is a public space. She knows that, contrary to regular practice,
she intends her own information to be private and not shared beyond the speciﬁc network of
friends who have access to her proﬁle, but she has no such signal about the information posted
by others, including the younger cousins to whom she is linked online.
Although it appears that the default is ‘public’ for Facebook information, users describe being
sensitive and responsive to signals (usually explicit) to the contrary. Thus, it is possible to create
exceptions to this general rule. For example, Belinda (female, employed, twenties) describes a
situation in which she happened to view information was posted to and then deleted from the
proﬁle of a friend. In this circumstance:
Even though it was posted on Facebook, the fact that they deleted it and didn’t want anyone to see it
sort of told me that was supposed to be a private ﬁght or a personal ﬁght that they didn’t want anyone
to know about. But I just happened to be awake and saw it as it happened.
Respecting this signal, she chose not to talk about the information, even to the individual who
had posted it. Later on in the interview, she is explicit about her position:
I think if they’ve posted it and they’ve put that information out there, then it’s OK if you tell somebody
… [but] if they put it in a private thing, or if they asked me not to tell anybody, I wouldn’t tell
anybody.
There are some people (typically parents and employers) with whom information sharing is
more circumspect, and evidently sensitive information posted on Facebook is more likely to be
held in conﬁdence. Thus, Janet, a young woman in her early twenties, remarks:
People can share very sensitive information on their proﬁles sometimes, and it has to be up to our
discretion to share, with whom, and in what format. If I ﬁnd out that a friend had a miscarriage
through Facebook, I would not go posting about it on someone else’s proﬁle.
Even in this case, however, Janet might ‘send a mutual friend a message asking if they saw it’
– so sharing is limited by the evident sensitivity of a topic, but not entirely eliminated.
Conclusion
Boyd (2007) characterizes online social spaces as ‘networked publics’, consisting of digitally
interconnected audiences with indistinct boundaries (see also Gelman, 2009). The social practices
and expectations described by our research participants are consistent with this concept, in that
their online proﬁles are produced for and most participate as members of exactly such large
and loosely linked social groups. In particular, online proﬁles are structured with the view that
‘everyone’ (at least the members of a broad and socially coherent group with what might be
described as ‘blurry’ or ‘leaky’ boundaries) could see them, even if the explicitly intended audience
is more limited, and participants generally treat information posted by and about others in the
same vein, treating Facebook posting as tantamount to public disclosure that allows discussion
both within and beyond the online social connections to whom it is explicitly disclosed. These
social norms are inconsistent with the claim that Facebook is a private space; instead, it
appears that participants view and treat online social networks as public venues.
It is important to note that our discussions did not explicitly focus on privacy and privacy concerns:
instead, we engaged our participants in a dialogue about information sharing practices.
Information, Communication & Society 9
Downloadedby[MasarykovaUniverzitavBrne],[Tae-SikKim]at03:3430June2014
Although the information posted in online proﬁles is clearly personal in nature, in that it reveals
aspects of the self, proﬁle owners typically anticipate further disclosure, and proﬁle viewers tend
to believe further disclosure is appropriate: thus, there appears to be a general belief that the information
posted to social network proﬁles is intended and developed for broad disclosure. This
should not be taken to imply that there are no privacy considerations with respect to Facebook
proﬁles: there are very real and well-documented privacy risks associated with the revelation
of personal information on social networking sites (see, for example, Rosenblum, 2007).
Instead, our results suggest that social network participants enter into online social spaces with
the assumption that the information posted there is available to a broad and ill-deﬁned audience
with no clear boundaries. As such, it appears that online social information is treated as ‘public’ as
opposed to ‘private’. Even though most of our participants acknowledged creating boundaries
around their Facebook proﬁle through a friends list (only one had a totally open proﬁle), they
all tailored their Facebook proﬁle to appeal to a much larger audience, as their practices indicate.
Indeed, easily accepting new friends is a common practice, as is sharing information found on
Facebook with one’s friends outside of the explicitly identiﬁed audience. In very limited circumstances,
information found on Facebook is considered too personal to be shared, but such boundaries
appear to be exceptions to a general rule that Facebook is a public space.
If we concede (as these data suggest we must) that online social networks are indeed viewed
and treated by participants as ‘public’ spaces, does it necessarily follow that there can be no
privacy expectations with respect to the information revealed in online social network proﬁles?
Although at ﬁrst blush ‘private’ and ‘public’ might seem to be polar opposites, legal scholars, philosophers,
and those involved with information technologies have explored the possibility of
‘privacy in public’. This work suggests that, in at least some circumstances with respect to
some information, people can maintain a privacy interest in information they reveal in a public
domain. Greenﬁeld (2011), for example, explores the privacy implications of sensors deployed
in public spaces. His focus is on devices that record and act upon public behaviour (e.g.
walking across a public street or looking at a publicly displayed advertisement), and he concludes
that while some systems are innocuous (e.g. motion-triggered lights that signal the presence of a
pedestrian in a crosswalk) others present signiﬁcant privacy risks and indeed challenge privacy
expectations (e.g. ‘bi-directional’ video billboards that unobtrusively capture and analyse
viewer images to determine characteristics such as sex, age, and ethnicity). His convincing and
persuasive analysis suggests strongly that some ‘public’ behaviours (or implications drawn
from those behaviours) are in some sense viewed as ‘private’ by those performing them.
Moreham (2006) provides a legal analysis on the question of whether a person might have a
reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to actions taken or information revealed in a
public place. Although her analysis is restricted to cases in the English courts, she demonstrates
clearly that the courts have been willing to extend privacy protection to publicly revealed information,
given consideration of location, the nature of the activity, the way in which the information
was obtained, and the extent to which the individual is the speciﬁc focus of any further
disclosure. Nissenbaum (1998) argues for a right to privacy that extends to public spaces. She
bases her argument in a notion of ‘contextual privacy’ that suggests that information is revealed
for particular purposes in particular contexts, and that privacy violations occur when that information
is used for other purposes or in other contexts. According to Nissenbaum, the notion of
contextual integrity applies even in public, and privacy violations can occur if publicly revealed
information is used for unintended purposes by unanticipated parties. Finally, Cheung (2009)
argues that public privacy is becoming increasingly important in the Internet era, given the
ease and speed with which revealed content can be captured and disseminated to an extremely
broad audience. Further analysis is required to determine whether the principles outlined by
these authors provide motivation for a privacy interest in social network proﬁle information;
10 J. Burkell et al.
Downloadedby[MasarykovaUniverzitavBrne],[Tae-SikKim]at03:3430June2014
the notion of ‘privacy in public’, however, clearly offers an interesting lens through which to view
the issue of privacy in online social spaces, and offers potential for the extension of a privacy protection
to information revealed in these spaces.
Acknowledgements
This project has been funded by the Ofﬁce of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC); the view
expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reﬂect those of the OPC.
Notes on contributors
Jacquelyn Burkell is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University
of Western Ontario. Her research and teaching focus on social implications of technology, with a particular
emphasis on the effect of technological mediation on access to and use of information. She and
her graduate students are active in GRAND NCE, a multidisciplinary research network exploring the application
and advancement of graphics, animation and new media in Canada. [email: jburkell@uwo.ca]
Alexandre Fortier is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of
Western Ontario. His research interests focus on how individual differences inﬂuence the ways in which
people need, seek and use information in everyday contexts, with an awareness of the privacy implications
of their practices and how that informs information policy. [email: afortie2@uwo.ca]
Lorraine (Lola) Yeung Cheryl Wong is a PhD Student in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the
University of Western Ontario. Her research focuses on exploring the motivations for and characteristics of
the social sharing of news and other non-self generated content. Wong is also the chair of the Graduate
Student Postdoc Committee for GRAND NCE. [email: lola.wong@uwo.ca]
Jennifer Lynn Simpson, Hon BA (Toronto), JD (Western), MSc (LSE) is currently an articling student at the
Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Ottawa, Ontario. Previously she was a telecom and technology consultant
working out of Boston, USA. She expects to be called to the bar in Ontario in 2014. She wishes to thank her
co-authors and, in particular, Professor Burkell for the opportunity to enhance her knowledge of privacy law,
in Canada and abroad, through this project. [email: jsimps4@uwo.ca]
References
Abril, P. S. (2007). Recasting privacy torts in a spaceless world. Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, 21
(1), 1–47. Retrieved from http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v21/21HarvJLTech001.pdf
Barnes, S. B. (2006). A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States. First Monday, 11(9).
Retrieved from http://ﬁrstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/1394/
1312%23note4
boyd, d. (2007). Why youth ♥ social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life. In D.
Buckingham (Ed.), Youth, identity, and digital media (pp. 119–142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Carey, R., & Burkell, J. (2009). A heuristics approach to understanding privacy-protecting behaviors in
digital social environments. In I. Kerr, V. Steeves, & C. Lucock (Eds.), Lessons from the identity trail
(pp. 65–82). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Cheung, A. S. Y. (2009). Rethinking public privacy in the Internet era: A study of virtual persecution by the
Internet crowd. Journal of Media Law, 2, 191–217. Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1683422
Crocker, T. P. (2009). From privacy to liberty: The fourth amendment after Lawrence. UCLA Law Review, 1,
1–69.
Debatin, B., Lovejoy, J., Horn, A. K., & Hughes, B. N. (2009). Facebook and online privacy: Attitudes,
behaviors, and unintended consequences. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 15, 83–
108. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01494.x
Frangione v. Vandongen et al., ONSC 2823 (2010).
Gelman, L. A. (2009). Privacy, free speech, and ‘blurry-edged’ social networks. Boston College Law Review,
50, 1315–1344. Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1520111
Greenﬁeld, A. (2011, April 20). Connected things, privacy and public space: Approach to a taxonomy. Paper
prepared for Insights on Privacy Speaker Series, Ofﬁce of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Ottawa,
Information, Communication & Society 11
Downloadedby[MasarykovaUniverzitavBrne],[Tae-SikKim]at03:3430June2014
Ontario. Retrieved December 7, 2013, from http://www.priv.gc.ca/information/research-recherche/2011/
greenﬁeld_201104_e.asp
Grimmelmann, J. (2009). Saving Facebook. Iowa Law Review, 94, 1139–1206. Retrieved from http://ssrn.
com/abstract=1262822
Gross, R., & Acquisti, A. (2005). Information revelation and privacy in online social networks. Proceedings
of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (pp. 71–80). doi:10.1145/1102199.
1102214
Häkkilä, J., & Chatﬁeld, C. (2005). ‘It’s like if you opened someone else’s letter’: User perceived privacy and
social practices with SMS communication. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Human
Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (pp. 219–222). New York, NY: ACM.
Joinson, A. (2008). Looking at, looking up or keeping up with people? Motives and uses of Facebook.
Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
(pp. 1027–1036). doi:10.1145/1357054.1357213
Kerr, O. S. (2010). Applying the fourth amendment to the Internet: A general approach. Stanford Law
Review, 62, 1004–1049. Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1348322
Lange, P. (2007). Publicly private and privately public: Social networking and YouTube. Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1). Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/
lange.html
Lee, D. H. (2009). Mobile snapshots and public-private boundaries. Knowledge, Technology and Policy, 22
(3), 161–171.
Lewis, J., & West, A. (2009). ‘Friending’: London-based undergraduates’ experience of Facebook. New
Media and Society, 11(7), 1209–1229. doi:10.1177/1461444809342058
Moreham, N. A. (2006). Privacy in public places. Cambridge Law Journal, 65(3), 606–635. doi:10.1017/
S0008197306007240
Murphy v Perger, O.J. No. 5511 (2007).
Nissenbaum, H. F. (1998). Protecting privacy in and information age: The problem of privacy in public. Law
and Philosophy, 17, 559–596. Retrieved from http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/privacy.
pdf
Park v. Mullin, BCSC 1813 (2005).
Patchin, J. W., & Hinduja, S. (2010). Trends in online social networking: Adolescent use of Myspace over
time. New Media and Society, 12(2), 197–216. doi:10.1177/1461444809341857
Petronio, S. (2002). Boundaries of privacy: Dialectics of disclosure. Albany: State University of New York
Press.
R. v. Plant, 3 S.C.R. 281 (1993).
R. v. Tessling, 3 S.C.R. 432 (2004).
Rainie, L., Lenhart, A., & Smith, A. (2012). The tone of life on social networking sites. Pew Research
Center’s Internet and American Life Project. Retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/
Social-networking-climate.aspx
Rosenblum, D. (2007). What anyone can know: The privacy risks of social networking sites. Security and
Privacy, 5(30), 40–49. doi:10.1109/MSP.2007.75
Schuster v. Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Company of Canada, CanLII 58971 (ONSC 2009).
Sparks v. Dubé, NBQB 40 (2011).
Strahilevitz, L. J. (2004). A social networks theory of privacy. John M. Olin Law and Economics Working
Paper No. 230 (2D Series). University of Chicago. doi:10.2139/ssrn.629283
Thelwall, M., & Wilkinson, D. (2010). Public dialogs in social networks: What is their purpose? Journal of
the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(2), 392–404. doi:10.1002/asi.21241
Tsjeng, Z. (2010, March 21). Facebook: Why we can’t live without it. Guardian.co.uk. Retrieved from http://
www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/21/facebook-cant-live-without-it
Tverdek, E. (2008). What makes information ‘public’? Public Affairs Quarterly, 22(1), 63–77. Retrieved
from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40441479
Vaughan-Nichols, S. (2013, May 14). Facebook remains top social network, Google+, YouTube battle for
second. ZDNet.com. Retrieved from http://www.zdnet.com/facebook-remains-top-social-network-
google-youtube-battle-for-second-7000015303/
Viégas, F. B. (2005). Bloggers’ expectations of privacy and accountability: An initial survey. Journal of
Computer-Mediated communication, 10(3), Article 12. Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/
issue3/viegas.html
12 J. Burkell et al.
Downloadedby[MasarykovaUniverzitavBrne],[Tae-SikKim]at03:3430June2014