Like everyone on the planet who uses Facebook, I have a love/hate relationship with the site.
On one hand, it’s a great way to keep in touch with people. When my friend got married last month, the maid of honour arranged all the bachelorette and wedding-shower details through Facebook. It’s simply a better, more flexible communication tool than email chains, which are static and unwieldy.
It always throws me off when I run into someone who doesn’t use Facebook. “But how do you live?” I gasp, forgetting that once upon a time, I didn’t use it, either. Once I got it, however, it immediately became the primary way I stayed in touch with my friends, my out-of-town family and even my colleagues.
Yet there’s always been the understanding that Facebook is like the Dark Lord Sauron of websites. The corporation claims ownership of all content posted on its site, and it has a terrible reputation for playing fast and loose with its privacy rules. As the site constantly changes its layouts and functions, its users have to be always on their toes, ready to readjust their privacy settings the moment Facebook restructures itself.
As my personal identity grew from university student to graduate student to working professional, I constantly had to adjust not only the ways I chose to use Facebook, but the ways I was letting Facebook use me.
I don’t mean that in the metaphorical way we say: “Oh, yes, I’m addicted to Facebook.” Like any communication site, Facebook uses its users, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The corporation generates income in a variety of ways, but most significantly through the use of sponsored advertisements on its users’ pages and news feeds.
And this is where some British Columbians think Facebook has overstepped its bounds. A Vancouver woman named Louise Douez is launching a class-action lawsuit against Facebook for using her private information to generate revenue through ads. B.C. Supreme Court Justice Susan Griffin declared in a ruling last Friday that enough evidence exists to support allegations that Facebook used photos of its users through its “Sponsored Stories advertising” product without their consent. Facebook plans to fight the lawsuit.
The case is interesting not only because it involves a B.C. woman, but because it is a good indication of the status of the Internet.
Remember back in the late 1990s and early noughts, when we talked about the potential democratic revolution of the Internet?
Online life as we know it today is structured by companies, hit counters and ad revenues. In a million ways, both large and small, money structures (that is, money both limits and enables) our online interactions and our access to content. Finding your image being used as an advertisement is as good a wakeup call to this reality as any.
Like most people my age, I engage with social media with a devil-may-care attitude. When it comes to protecting and cultivating your online presence, there are so many potential pitfalls that it doesn’t do to stress over every little thing. We’ve reached the point where a few social-media faux pas are no longer anything to blink at.
If that picture of me in the bunny ears from that party in second year pops up in my future, nobody’s going to think much of it, because by this point we will all have an embarrassing picture from a party in second year circulating somewhere online. (Ugh, I was wearing fuchsia lipstick, too. Not my colour at all.)
“Well, what do you expect when you use Facebook?” has been the response of some. It’s true that Facebook is a free service, and those who use it without comprehending its terms of agreement do so at their peril. That’s not the case here, however, and it’s clear that Douez has valid grievances with the corporation.
Given that, the “Well, what do you expect?” response is entirely wrong. Corporations structure and commodify so much of our lives, both online and offline, that we need to be the ones policing their behaviour — because if not us, then who?
This lawsuit, regardless of its success or failure, should remind us of the care and diligence required in defending the rights of the individual against the profits of the corporation.
