Controlling Access: Public or Private?

In unmediated social situations, people tend to know who is present to witness a social act. This is not often the case in networked publics where audiences are

invisible and access is asynchronous. Physical limitations help control the boundaries of unmediated environments—walls define the space and expressions can be

witnessed only in hearing or visual range. Online, boundaries are porous—search collapses contexts, replicability allows traces of social acts to be copied to other spaces, and the persistence of data means that acts performed are not bounded by ephemerality. In other words, trying to keep social acts to one space online is futile, even though that is the norm in unmediated environments. Teens center their understanding of context on other people. Lacking the ability to control context and audience by confining social acts to particular spaces, teens must define the situation by controlling the potential audience. Inaccurate data may prevent searching, but it is not an effective tool for controlling access. Instead, teens leverage privacy settings to limit access to specific people, reinforcing the connection between audience and context in networked publics.

Controlling visibility through privacy settings varies by site. On MySpace,

anyone, while only an individual’s Friends can access “private” profiles. Facebook is a bit more complex because its privacy settings involve high school and

neighborhood networks. Teens can make their profiles visible to just their Friends or they can adjust the settings to involve everyone in their networks. Facebook allows teens to adjust settings by module. Since my fieldwork ended, Facebook has added additional layers of privacy, including the ability to make groups of people and control elements by groups.

All of the teens who I interviewed were aware of privacy settings, but not all knew how to use them or what the options meant. Nick, the 16-year-old in Los Angeles, told me that when his brother’s girlfriend created his profile, she set it to private and he has yet to figure out how to change this. While some teens may not know how, 66 percent of those interviewed by Pew in 2006 (Lenhart and Madden 2007b) reported that they limit access to their profile in some way. This is

particularly impressive given that users frequently do not understand privacy options, let alone adjust the default settings (Lederer et al. 2004).

While teens do appear to limit access, I found that their perceptions of visibility did not always match with reality, particularly with respect to Facebook. Because Facebook is perceived as the safer alternative to MySpace, few teens bother looking at the privacy settings there. At a private gathering after I finished my fieldwork, I was talking with a teen girl about the differences between MySpace and Facebook and she told me that Facebook was much more private because only people you

knew could see your profile. Logging into Facebook, I joined the town network she was in, accessed her profile, and showed it to her. She was shocked—she had not realized that joining a town network made her profile visible to people who claimed to be from that town. I have been able to repeat this “party trick” on multiple occasions with both teens and adults. While there is no data on how many teens join town networks or how many of those do not realize how visible their profiles are, I was able to access many teen profiles by joining town networks across the country and I sensed that few of those I looked at, and teens in general, realized this. Teens throughout the country told me that they thought Facebook is safer than MySpace because of how it handles privacy. When asked why, Sasha, the 16-year-old from Michigan, told me that more controls meant greater privacy, while black 15-year-old Kaleb, also from Michigan, told me that he did not know why but he “just got that feeling.” In fact, both of these teens had Facebook pages that were more visible than a Friends-only MySpace page would be.

Teenagers who use MySpace are far more fluent in the language of privacy settings and most have consciously chosen to make their profiles public or private.

The teens I met who had public profiles had chosen this route intentionally. Some teens left their profiles public so that they could more easily be found. Sabrina, a white 14-year-old from Texas, explains that being public is the best way to be found by friends. She says, “I have searched some of my friends by their name, but if [their profile is] on private, then I can’t really find out if that’s who they are.” In Los Angeles, Eduardo, a Hispanic 17-year-old musician, leaves his profile visible because

his music is available there. He hopes others will listen to it and he wants to be able to connect with other musicians and be accessible to potential fans. Some teens eschew the pressure to go private because they think that this implies they have something to hide. For example, Shean, the 17-year-old from Los Angeles, keeps his profile public because, as he says, “I don’t believe there’s anything on my page that’s private.” At the same time, he acknowledges that some of his friends have turned theirs private to avoid specific people and to keep spammers away.

Teens who chose to make their profiles private also had specific reasons for wanting to control who could access their content. Some, like Penelope, the 15-year-old from Nebraska, wanted to be able to know their audience. Penelope explained that she kept her profile private “so that I know who’s looking at my page at what time.” While she is not actually aware of who is viewing her profile, she wants to have control over who might be able to. Others, like white 15-year-old Ann from Seattle, make their profiles private as a safety precaution. Ann explains, “My profile is private and friends only because I want to be safe and don’t want my parents to worry.” For Ann, and for many other teens who joined after hearing various horror stories, visibility is not worth the potential risks. Laura, a white 17-year-old with Native American roots from Washington, explains, “The risk of having an open profile is not worth it to me. I want to feel in control of my own personal safety. I don’t want the whole world to be aware of my feelings or what school I go to.” She is concerned that ill-intentioned strangers could use her information against her and she thinks keeping it tightly guarded is a form of protection. Many teens keep their

profiles private to prevent access by parents, teachers, siblings, college admissions officers, or others who might use their content against them. Others do so in an attempt to avoid spammers, scammers, marketers, and phishers.

Even those who want to be found by some are not keen to be found by all and those who think they have nothing to hide are not necessarily craving to be seen by just anyone. Many of those I interviewed who had adopted MySpace early on often saw the site as teen-centric and saw no need to make their profiles private because being public made connecting with friends and classmates easier. Through time, as adults began to join and other issues emerged, many of these teens made their profiles private. Their stance—“public by default, private when necessary”—is an approach I regularly saw teens take to privacy-related issues. The rise of adults and the potential dangers of unwanted attention forced teens to revert to a more private stance, although they often preferred the easy access that being public allowed.

Being “public” made sense when the relatively homogeneous potential audience did not create conflicts in how people presented themselves, but when teens started facing unwanted audiences, many chose to control access instead of limit self-presentation.

While most teens I interviewed do not regret moving toward a Friends-only model, it does complicate the process of Friending on MySpace. With public profiles, teens could justify not accepting Friend requests from people whom they knew but did not feel close to. When they made their profiles private, they closed

off visibility to all but their Friends. Because of this, those who switched from public to private felt more compelled to include their broader peer group among their Friends. Facebook altered this dynamic somewhat, allowing teens to make their profiles visible to all classmates without accepting them as Friends. At the same time, other pressures often motivated teens to include all classmates as Friends. This is discussed in more detail in the next chapter.

The desire teens have to control access also has a counterpart in their desire to know who is viewing their profile. Teens like Penelope, the 15-year-old from Nebraska, limit access in order to know who is viewing her profile, but teens also seek out other mechanisms to keep tabs on their visitors. This desire to know drove software coders to write “trackers” for MySpace, allowing users to copy and paste bits of javascript code into their profiles to capture the IP addresses of those who visited their pages. Some of these initial scripts worked, but MySpace quickly blocked them. This did not reduce their desirability, though, and users began scouring the web for alternatives. While some coders tried to write legitimate software to perform this task, a host of scammers began capitalizing on teens’ desire to have this feature. They disguised phishing and spamming code as trackers, getting millions of teens (and adults) who do not understand what their scripts do to install them on their pages. This malware did tremendous damage to MySpace and the company spent extensive time trying to stop what scammers were doing. In 2007, Tom Anderson, the founder of MySpace, posted an entry, pleading with users to not

add trackers to their profiles.⁹ The company posted bulletins about spammers, phishing, and bogus scripts. Yet as I write this, searching for combinations of

“myspace profile tracker” produces millions of hits in Google for sites offering free code to track profile viewers. Some claim to be “official” and others claim to be “the most advanced,” but the fact that many of them claim to be “real” is most indicative of the problem that this desire has produced. None of these trackers works, but teens still copy and paste code from these sites into their profiles in an effort to know who is visiting.

On the surface, controlling and tracking access is often viewed as being about safety, but in practice, it ends up serving as a mechanism to bound context. Teens want to have a sense for who is present so that they know what is appropriate. As adults joined the site, teens also wanted to control for what happens when their self-performances are used against them, either because of misunderstanding or

disagreement. Two such incidents forced Kira, a Latina-white 17-year-old in Seattle, to make her profile private and peers-only. First, her grandfather found her public profile, where she had filled out answers to a quiz that asked, “What Sublime song are you?” Her answers resulted in her getting the song “Smoke Two Joints” and her profile displayed some of the lyrics: “I smoke two joints in the morning, I smoke two joints in the afternoon.” She liked the song and so she did not think much about it until her grandfather caused everyone in her family to “flip out” by

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informing them that she was abusing marijuana. After that, she made her profile private but left her stepmother as one of her Friends. Her grandparents later used her stepmother’s account to access her profile and misinterpreted a photo she posted of a group of girls with “I love Colleen and Kylie and Brook” below it. She had come out as bisexual to them and they interpreted the profile note as an indication that she was sleeping around. After that uproar, she de-Friended all adults. In recounting this story, Kira expressed frustration that she could not say anything online without adults misinterpreting what she said.

Misinterpretation is one challenge teens face. Clyde, a Hispanic-white 16-year-old from Michigan, keeps his profile private because he is afraid that people might misinterpret the comments left by his Friends and believe that he is a “jerk.” His comments include “Screw you over. You suck. Go get a life, [and] just mean comments nobody would get besides me.” He knows his Friends are joking around, but he thinks that others might not realize this. Another issue for teens is that their friends and parents do not necessarily share their views on what is appropriate. In Seattle, James, a white 17-year-old with Native American roots, decided to make his profile private after watching a friend get into trouble. After a party, his friend’s Friends posted comments on his MySpace page, saying things like, “Oh, man, you were so messed up at that party. You were so drunk. You were so high.” His friend’s mother saw the comments and promptly grounded him. James was not concerned that his parents would object to his profile, but he was concerned that his Friends might post something that would get him into trouble with his parents. Because

teens’ self-presentations are co-constructed by those around them, controlling access is also desirable to prevent broader audiences from accessing content that they do not control.

Teens rely on privacy features to control the social situation online. These features, while beneficial, are not without their problems. As discussed in the next chapter, choosing whom to Friend can often be socially awkward. Thus, teens are often forced to include people from different social contexts as Friends or to include those with whom they are not that close. Thus, their ability to constrain the audience does not necessarily resolve their desire to have a coherent context in which to act.