(MintPress) – The world in which we live in has grown smaller since the advent of social media. Governments have fallen, revolutions have begun, lives have been saved and histories have been rewritten because of Twitter. Social media and social networks have — far and away — reached the hopes and expectations of the World Wide Web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, who imagined the Web becoming “a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write.”
The importance of social media can not be underestimated. Social media introduced the world to the concept of instant communication. Suddenly, events on the other side of the world can be reported on as they happen. Full, knowledgeable conversations about events are happening minutes after the event happened, instead of days. Video, audio and photos of wars abroad and events that would be otherwise ignored have turned this generation into the most knowledgeable in the history of humanity.
While the implied “importance” of what you were thinking while putting on your socks this morning or how the slice of pizza you ate for lunch was “the most mind-blowing thing I ever saw!” may put most people off the idea of following tweets and Facebook statuses — the fine reality is that more news and information of vital importance is traded over social networks at a faster rate than with any other media.
However, concerns about online privacy are on the rise. In a Consumer Reports investigation, more people were concerned about the amount of non-Facebook-essential information that is collected and stored by the service. In light of recent reports of Internet services cooperating with the federal government’s digital eavesdropping efforts, this represents a troubling trend.
Monday, Instagram, the 100 million subscribers-strong free social media app that allows users to share photos with the world, announced that it will be changing its privacy policy, effective Jan. 16:
“You hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licenseable, worldwide license to use the content that you post on or through the service … You agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos, and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.”
This change in stance created an uproar among Instagram’s subscribers, attesting that copyright protection is being violated. Since Facebook purchased Instagram in April for $1 billion, the company has sought a way to monetize the service. Instagram ran on a profitless, goal-less, fiscally innocent business model that focused solely on keeping the app running day-to-day. As this made no provisions for future planning — or even how the bills will be paid month-to-month — Facebook was stuck trying to turn a popular idea into a working, sustainable business. While no one really knows Facebook’s monetization plans for Instagram (as they probably changed in light of the protests), it is easy to guess that it was highly unlikely that Facebook wanted to actually sell personal photos to advertisers (although, extremely popular and trending photos might conceivably be used for advertising purposes).
What is more likely is that Facebook wanted to use users photos in advertising targeted specifically to you. A person is more likely to open or read an advertisement if it is immediately relatable, and nothing is more relatable than your own memories. A simple script could identify the most popular picture from your Instagram account, load it into an ad, and — suddenly and with minimum effort — the ad has been customized for the user, guaranteeing interest.
In monetizing the Internet, it is said that the user is either the buyer or the thing being sold. In the case of subscription-based services, the media service would charge a recurring fee that covers the costs of operation to its users in return for unrestricted access to services. In an advertising-based service, however, the media service sells access to you through advertisers, who place an ad on the media service for their goods and services. For the opportunity to show their ad to a captive audience of service users, the ad buyer pays the media service for the ad space.
The key behind advertising-based monetization is to get users to actually click on the ad — which takes the user to the sponsor’s website and allows the sponsor to directly sell to a new potential customer. Google does this with AdWords, their advertising program that detects keywords and patterns in a user’s browsing history and sends advertising that the service feels the user may be interested in. Ultimately, in creating successful advertising, the ad must create a strong emotional bond — either positive or negative — that would drive the user to react.
In this, lies the problem. In an attempt to turn the Internet into a revenue-creator, personal privacy has been compromised. Browsing histories are scrutinized by ad companies; banner ads, keywords and pop-ups have reached a new level of prominence; and apps that regularly report on your location and things as mundane as your reading and music habits have become commonplace.
One would argue that you willingly surrender your privacy on the Internet. One would argue that the argument made by Jamie Bell on his Twitter feed — “For anyone who cares for copyright over their own images & photographs, get off of Instagram now” — is reactionary and does not take into consideration that regular social media users have abandoned all claims to privacy a long time ago.
One would even argue that this whole conversation is making much of nothing, as Facebook has come forward and said that the new terms of service are being misinterpreted, that Instagram is not interested in selling user’s photos.
However, in light of increasing censorship of social media and the push to commercialize social networks, it is important to address that this service must stay free and open.
The price of speech
“As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.
“Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.”
— Twitter, Jan. 26, 2012
On Jan. 26, Twitter announced that it would allow blocking of content in regards to the wishes of a nation. This is a troubling situation, as the nations most likely to ban social media are the nations in which free speech is most restricted. According to Reporters Without Borders, Armenia, Bahrain, Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam have all engaged in news censoring and active Internet site blocking. Australia, Egypt, Eritrea, France, India, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Russia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates have made inroads toward establishing the infrastructure needed to monitor the Internet, but haven’t actively engaged in monitoring or blocking activities as of yet.
According to a BBC World Service global public opinion poll,
“Four in five adults (79%) regard internet access as their fundamental right, according to a new global poll conducted across 26 countries for BBC World Service. The poll of more than 27,000 adults conducted by GlobeScan found that 87 per cent of those who used the internet felt that internet access should be ‘the fundamental right of all people.’ More than seven in ten (71%) non-internet users also felt that they should have the right to access the web … Most web users are very positive about the changes the internet has brought to their lives,with strong support for the information available, the greater freedom it brings and social networking … Nearly four in five (78%) said they felt it had brought them greater freedom, nine in ten (90%) said they thought it was a good place to learn, and just over half (51%) said they now enjoyed spending their spare time on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace.”
The Arab Spring is an excellent example of why blocking the Internet is dangerous. The protests were conceived and promoted online. The stories about successes in Egypt and Tunisia traveled around the world in real-time, inspiring protests in Bahrain, Libya, Syria and even the United States. Most of the dictators in the Middle East’s authoritarian states ruled through ignorance — the people knew only what was told to them and they were too separated ideologically to come together and share ideas counter to the “official storyline.” The real-time sharing of ideas created a cascading effect that soon swept up the entire world. An Arab Spring activist once said, “We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate and YouTube to tell the world.”
President Obama was swept to victory by aggressive campaigning over social media in 2008. In traditional campaigns, field workers connect to potential voters. Those field workers connect to a block captain, who connects to a neighborhood captain, who connects to a local director, who connects to a regional director, who connects to the state’s campaign manager, who connects to the national campaign manager, who connects to the candidate. This separation from the voter makes field campaigning a low-yield proposition. However, via social media, Obama was able to not only connect to the voters themselves, but connect to the voters most likely to win him office: socially-mobile 18 to 35 year olds.
During the 2011 Egyptian protests, Twitter and Facebook were blocked on Jan. 25 and 26, and all Internet access in the nation was blocked by Jan. 27. This was done to cripple the protesters’ communication with each other and the outside world and to break organizational efforts. In response to this, Google and Twitter teamed up to introduce Speak to Tweet service to Egypt, in which tweets can be recorded and played via audio. (The service has been re-launched to support the Syrian revolution as of Nov. 30 of this year). Foreign Internet service providers, such as France’s French Data Network, offered zero-cost dial-up Internet access over telephone landlines. President Obama also called on Egypt to lift the Internet ban:
“The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights and the United States will stand up for them everywhere. I also call upon the Egyptian government to reverse the actions that they’ve taken to interfere with access to the internet, to cellphone service and to social networks that do so much to connect people in the 21st century.”
The ban was lifted by Feb. 2.
The question at play here is “net neutrality,” or the concept that the Internet should not be restricted by legislation or by commercialization. There have been fears that the major Internet service providers are attempting to create a tiered service model that would effectively ban non-copyrighted materials, such as YouTube or third-party content. This would create artificial scarcity that would force Internet users to subscribe to costlier, uncompetitive services — such as cable. In the preservation of free speech, net neutrality is essential, as it is paramount to freely expressing as a person chooses. The telecoms have argued that they have no plans to use this to block content, even though proof exists that Comcast did, indeed, do exactly that.
Which returns the argument to the commercialization of the Internet. Free speech costs money; hiring reporters, buying bandwidth and renting servers all cost a significant investment in capital. Monetizing content on the Internet is not inherently wrong, but when the personal liberties of the user are jeopardized, the end can no longer justify the means. In this new world of instantaneous speech, we must work doubly hard to protect and secure the values we claim to hold sacred: freedom of free speech, freedom from persecution and freedom to live freely without unwelcomed observation or judgement.
True privacy online may be an oxymoron, as material placed online will be downloaded and uploaded and copied multiple times, and it is utterly unthinkable to think that something embarrassing or mildly interesting would disappear from the Internet through any amount of effort. The “right to be forgotten,” or the right to have old or requested material about you die off and disappear on the Net, has gained ground, but such a law would require organizational oversight over the whole of the Internet, which simply does not exist. Also, as long as the Internet exists, people — by their nature — will seek to misuse it.
Corporations will use it to research employees’ private lives, and government officials will use it to collaborate interrogations or to gain early intelligence on prisoners. Thieves will use it to steal private information.
While Instagram’s potential use of private photos for commercial reasons is reprehensible, it’s not necessarily news. Privacy on the Internet, for the most part, is an illusion as it stands now. More must be done to protect the rights of the individual.
In an article from the Harvard Law Review, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis wrote, “Now the right to life has come to mean the right to enjoy life — the right to be let alone.”
Ultimately, we all must ask if we have the right to be let alone.