Author: Richie DeMaria
Laurie Clark (first-year) found it easy to make friends at Oxy. Hailing from Edmonton, Canada, the 18-year-old worried she would have a difficult time transitioning into a southern Californian collegiate life. Not so: Now, nearing the end of her first semester, she can count nearly 500 Facebook friends – and she’s making more every day. Her popularity is a testament to the friendliness of the Oxy student body, as well as her own confidence. Clark proves that, with the right attitude, you can make friends in any environment.There’s one problem: Laurie Clark doesn’t exist.
Laurie Clark never went to high school in Canada and never made it out to Occidental – she was never born. She may have 485 Oxy Facebook friends, and even has some wall posts from supposed friends eager to see her again, but she never met them, and they never met her.
Laurie Clark, in fact, is the creation of first-years Zack Bruno and Marielle Galanto. The two decided to make a fake Facebook profile as part of a semester-long research paper for CSP 4, “Science and You,” in which they were instructed to tackle a controversial topic. They picked the topic of internet privacy, and decided to test Facebook security by inventing Laurie. With a few profile pictures borrowed from Marielle’s friend who does not go to Oxy, and a convincing set of interests – her favorite TV shows include “Gossip Girl” and “The Hills,” while her hobbies include driving and “playing her guitar on a cool fall day” – Laurie seemed just like any other first-year. She had the same banal quotes, the same status updates.
“We were trying to put a lot of typical stuff on there,” Bruno said.
Bruno and Galanto designed her typically enough so as to deceive their classmates. It worked. Once Laurie Clark earned the friendship of a few friend-seeking or gullible first-years, her popularity skyrocketed. Half of the first-year class accepted her friend request, and within two days of creating her Facebook page, she could claim 300 first-years as her internet pals. Since then, riding on mutual friendships, Laurie Clark has made many more virtual friends.
Not everyone was so friendly to her, however. “We got a few people actually rejecting, saying, who are you, I don’t know you, leave me alone,” Bruno said.
Still, with so many acceptances, Laurie, if she existed, would probably be one of the most rapidly popular girls of the incoming class. “For the most part, everybody’s been accepting,” Galanto added.
The experiment, Galanto says, demonstrates the importance of personal vigilance and caution on social networking sites. “It’s a lot about individual responsibility when it comes to internet privacy,” she said.
In that sense, it is up to the user to protect him or herself. Fortunately, Facebook’s privacy settings allow users to customize who can and cannot see their personal information. Dustin Neiderman (first-year), one of Laurie Clark’s Facebook friends, sees no big problem with accepting requests from tenuous acquaintances. “Though I’m reluctant, I’m fine with accepting these [friend requests] because I’ve become a master at using the ‘you can’t see my profile/pictures/status updates’ tool, which virtually brings them back to point they started from,” he said.
However, it is not always so easy to determine a person’s identity. Facebook forbids its users from providing anything other than “their real names and information,” and forbids users from creating accounts for anyone other than themselves “without permission,” but, as the creation of Laurie Clark demonstrates, there is no protocol in place preventing the use of fake or manipulated information. The demand for “real names and information” is an attempt to enforce a slippery set of categories. One could, with a serviceable profile picture and junk mail address, fabricate a Facebook personality. “Anyone can make a fake Facebook profile. All you need is an e-mail and some pictures. It’s so simple,” Galanto said.
In October of this year, for example, a series of identical fake accounts were made with the purpose of infecting users’ computers with spywares. The previous month, four teens made a mocking and slanderous profile of a fellow student, depicting him as a gay racist and posting his personal information. Their fake profile of a real individual attracted nearly 600 friends and, shortly after, attracted a lawsuit from the cyber-bullied teen’s mother.
Furthermore, in registering an account with Facebook, users “consent” to sharing their information with the company. This information serves to benefit the company, Oxy Council on Library and Information Resources Digital Humanities Fellow and digital humanism professor Daniel Chamberlain said. “User actions – status updates, Blogger posts, web searches and the like – do not just involve users sharing private information, but are themselves acts that produce the data Google and Facebook need to succeed,” he said. “Users have a responsibility to understand how these privacy controls work, but they also need to know that most every interaction, even those marked private, are productive for the companies that facilitate them.”
Google, for example, automatically scans the e-mails of Gmail users and their respondents as a means of customizing advertisements. Google also combines this information with a user’s internet searches, both to cater to marketers and to understand how people use Google products. Facebook, too, analyzes its users’ profiles to tailor ads to their interests.
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a Dec. 3 interview with CNBC. “But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And . . . we’re all subject, in the U.S., to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that the information could be made available to the authorities.”
After a number of public outcries and legal changes, Facebook has altered some of its policies and become more transparent. In February 2009, the Consumerist blog noted a clause in Facebook’s terms that granted the Web site “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers) [user content].”Prompting fears that Facebook owned users’ information for all eternity, the phrase “irrevocable, perpetual” has since been removed, and the statement currently grants Facebook “a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook.”
Facebook has become one of the world’s largest market research databases. In allowing marketers to advertise based on pre-set demographics, such as sex, age, or race, the Web site serves as an ideal place for companies to gauge the appeal of their products. While users may adjust their privacy settings to restrict or customize what companies target them, they nonetheless “give [Facebook] permission to use your name and profile picture in connection with [advertising] content.”
Facebook privacy, then, does not start and end with the individual and his or her online friendships; privacy is also largely a function of Facebook’s business practices.In addition to demonstrating a fundamental insecurity in Facebook’s setup, Bruno and Galanto’s experiment raises questions about the meaning of friendship with the advent of social networking sites. Did users add Laurie Clark because they thought they knew her, because they wanted to appear to know her or because they were just being nice?”Facebook friendships are just an extension of a real friendship or they don’t really mean anything at all. The people I talk to on Facebook, I also talk to on the phone or in the real world,”
Sarah Beth Bertenthal (first-year) said. “Other Facebook friendships are only there because I was friend requested by someone I know and it would be rude to decline.”
Of course, Facebook friendship is not an indication of intimacy, but most often a means of enabling easy communication with close friends and peripheral acquaintances alike. “Friending is a part of online life, but it quickly becomes apparent to even new users of social networks that the ‘friends’ that make up online social networks do not necessarily map to the friends one has offline,” Chamberlain said. “I think that college students are sophisticated enough to recognize that friendship and relationships are developed through shared ideas and experiences, and do not simply exist when friend requests are accepted.”
No matter the strength of the offline friendship, though, Facebook users, as a result of their own friending and Facebook’s policies, grant strangers and advertisers alike a window into their personal information.
“On the one hand, it is nice to be able to share information so easily, but at the same time I often forget how many people have access to that information,” Doug Locke (senior), one of Laurie Clark’s friends, said.
Laurie Clark serves as a cautionary tale to anyone who befriends strangers on Facebook, suggesting that anyone who does so risks giving up personal information to someone with sinister intentions. “Our point is that they’re pretty much willingly giving up a portion of their privacy to someone they don’t actually know,” Bruno said.
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