The XX Factor: What women really think.

Childbirth Becomes an Interactive Experience

How Facebook Saved Privacy

"Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?" Scientific American asked in September. The answer provided was pretty much "yes." Over at the New York Times, my friend Tim Lee explains why this question—and the division it implies, of a privacy-rich pre-social networking past, and a voyeuristic dystopic present—is hopelessly muddled. "People are used to dividing the world into broadcast media (television, newspapers) and point-to-point communication (the telephone, face-to-face communication)," he explains. Concerned onlookers tend to put social networking sites in the first category, as if everyone were sharing their status updates via a major television network rather than with a vetted group of confidants. Newspapers and television do not allow you the luxury of selecting your audience, individual by individual; Facebook does.

In Tim's telling, social networking sites represent the advancement of Internet-related privacy rather than its demise... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Fools’ Names and Fools’ Faces on Facebook

Strip Searches Can Still Humiliate, Decades After the Fact

A guest post from Slate V intern, Lindsey Hough:

Dahlia's account of the oral argument yesterday in Savana Redding's case forced me to recall a memory of my own strip search. During my rebel stage of 13, I too had to take off my shirt for a school counselor so she could examine the little cat scratches I had etched into my bicep out of my devotion for a then-crush…let’s call him James. Out of adolescent defiance, I had somehow launched this fad of "cutting" in the 8th grade, and a small posse of girlfriends decided to grab their own bobby-pins to tattoo themselves. The school caught wind, and started interrogating.

One day, I was in PE class and watched as our counselor interrupted the game of kickball to drag a friend into her office. I knew what was up, and after class went into the girls' locker room to apply cover-up to the few scabs that measured the width of a strand of hair. I put on a long sleeve shirt and thought to myself, "There, no way they’ll find that." I tested my sleeve, pulling it all the way up to my shoulder with no success. My tracks were covered.

They made me take the shirt off, and obliterated any sense of autonomy I thought I had. I got the sense the counselor knew she was doing something fishy but covered by "bringing in the nurse who has to check it out." Forced to sit shirtless in front of these two women, I felt exposed and humiliated, embarrassed and angry. I felt they weren't just judging my actions but my body. We talk a lot on the XX Factor about young women and their changing ideas about privacy. But no matter who you are, being forced to take your clothes off against your will is an act of humiliation, embarrassment, and violation. It stings to know that 8 years after my own strip search, those feelings still don't matter.

Don't Be Afraid of the Grown-Ups!

Samantha, I understand your disappointment that Facebook isn't the cozy place it used to be, but can I chime in on behalf of the old folks? While it might be desirable to make your profile more "professional" if you're going to be using it for work, please don't think that we're all a bunch of humorless, judgmental old biddies. I, for one, refuse to detag the photo that a friend recently posted of me from college in which another friend and I are posing in the men's room of our co-ed dorm. It brings back too many funny memories. (Just like every generation thinks it invented sex, I suppose every generation thinks it's the first to get away with underage drinking and similar craziness. I assure you, there's probably little your generation can do to shock us.)

And I trust as you get older that you will see the other benefits of Facebook. I don't feel like I'm that old, but I've been out of school long enough to have had a half-dozen jobs in three states. I've always left behind people I adored but didn't manage to stay in touch with, which happens when you get married and start popping out kids. (Let me warn you, kids are a time-suck!) Thanks to Facebook, in the past few months I've found childhood friends, college friends, old co-workers. Granted, I don't spend hours obsessively e-mailing my long-lost pals, like some of Hanna's friends do, but it's great for catching up after years of silence and then occasionally responding to comments or posting. Back in January, I survived Ohio State's loss in the Fiesta Bowl by trading wall comments with a friend from first grade. When two beloved teachers from my high school passed away a couple months apart this winter, not only did I learn about their untimely deaths via Facebook, but I was able to come together with former classmates as we shared favorite stories about them.

Facebook, I guess, is like every other aspect of growing up. It might not be as carefree and fun as it used to be, but it offers its own rewards.

Being Seen and Being Used

A guest post from Slate intern Margaret Johnson.

Emily, I agree that privacy is not terribly precious to many members of our generation, proven narcissists that we are, and I don't think it's impossible to reconcile our lack of concern for privacy with a desire to control our information, as Bonnie suggested. But it seems useful to clarify what kind of control we value online and why. Our desire for the last say in what happens to the information we store on Facebook is not about wanting to restrict access to our information; the reason we post anything on a social networking site in first place is that we want it to be seen. What we value is having sole power to decide how we present ourselves online, to create a stage—I mean page—and persona that we can alter when and as we choose. And since that is way more important to us than issues of privacy, I suspect that most of us are satisfied with being able to strike photographs and messages from other users' view, whether or not Facebook retains a copy. Facebook's much maligned and eventually reneged changes to their terms of use didn't threaten this control, so I disagree with you, Emily, that our desire to maintain it is the root cause of our indignation over the new terms. What actually offended us is that Big Brother Zuckerberg could make big bucks selling information we volunteer for our own purposes without his asking or in any way compensating us. It's not being seen that bothers us, it's being used.

Privacy Is Only What You Make of It

Since When Does My Generation Care About Privacy?

Bonnie, your take on the Facebook information uproar is interesting, though I wonder if you're overlooking a key part of the issue: that most Facebook users don't actually care about privacy. As a longtime Facebook user (I joined in 2005, back when membership was still limited to college students), I have to say that I don't think privacy was ever a big concern for the first (or second, or third) wave of Facebook users. During a lecture I attended given by Harvey Rishikof, the national security expert suggested that my generation is the first group of Americans that puts almost no value on our privacy, and I tend to believe it. 

Starting with the ancient AOL member profile and extending now into the detailed personal information sections on sites like Facebook and MySpace, the concept of publicizing private information on the Web has always seemed natural for the cybergeneration. We see that with personal blogs, too: People will put all kinds of detailed information about themselves and their lives on the Internet without much thought for the safety or security of doing so. There has been controversy about Facebook's privacy standards before, and it never seemed to cause this much of a stir. Even the rumblings in early February about Zuckerberg's intent to sell off personal information on the site as the biggest microtargeting tool ever didn't garner as much attention as the Consumerist article (which was met with enough protest to make Zuckerberg change his mind).

So why are Facebook users suddenly worried about the security of their information? In part, I think it's because Facebook isn't just for co-eds anymore; people of all ages are jumping on social networks now, and with them come their concerns about free and open information-sharing. But I also think the issue is not one of privacy but of control. While my generation may not mind broadcasting intimate details and photos, we've always felt we had complete control over the private information we make public. The sudden realization that we might not have the power to remove all traces of ourselves from our electronic playground is what is giving users the heebie-jeebies. It's that lack of power, not privacy, that's making these information exhibitionists suddenly try to cover up.

Facebook Owns You for Life, Deal With It

I am really enjoying the Bristol Palin discussion, and hesitate to change the subject. I'm also a document nerd, though, so I'm fascinated by the Consumerist.com blowup over Facebook's latest iteration of its Terms of Use. On Feb. 4, the social network dropped a sentence in their service agreement that stated each member "may remove your User Content from the Site at any time."  Two weeks later, the consumer blog interpreted Facebook saying, "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever," and at least three new Facebook groups were instantly formed demanding control of data be returned to users.

Now I love the Consumerist, a cheeky Web presence from Consumer's Union, publisher of the reliably survey- and chart-happy Consumer Reports. Recently, I wanted another look at the service representative training manual I was schooled on at my first full time job at Northwestern Bell Telephone Company, circa 1968. The helpful Consumerist had a leaked version circa 2007 which was remarkably similar to the one I learned from 40 years ago. But on the data-control dispute, my sympathies are with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. After the Consumerist story and member protests, Zuckerberg worried on his blog that while "[p]eople want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time," that door is not so easily locked.  The Facebook founder could only offer weakly, "in the development of the open online world ... these issues are being worked out." 

At my long ago phone company job, when dealing with the public, we were trained to: "Attempt to identify and resolve the root cause of the issue. Empathize with the customer. Listen attentively to the customer's complaint and do not interrupt." We also learned early on, "If the customer is insistent on contacting an outside agency or an executive, immediately refer the customer to a Manager." At 19 years old, this was a valuable part of my education.

My more lasting impression from that job was that an individual's transactions and communications with institutions are rarely private. In the interest of customer service, my co-workers and I regularly poked around in installation and billing records and had ready access to non-published phone numbers. Although generally protected from dissemination, our personal information is typically not secret. (Deep and very personal secrets are, though usually anonymized, also public lately, but that deserves to be the topic of another post.) The closest we come to privacy, is what academics call "practical obscurity." Every day others have access to our banking, job performance, grades, medical records, magazine subscription histories, and yes, e-mail, text, and Facebook posts but, for the most part, our personal documents are of no special interest to the folks who review, analyze, crunch, or transmit them.

Now, given that he recently agreed to pay $65 million to a trio of upper classman who briefly employed the Harvard wiz kid then claimed he stole their source code, design, and business plan, Mark Zuckerberg may not be the most trustworthy of stewards for our collective socialization data. He has, however, for better or worse, produced a virtual gathering of friends, family and colleagues that is far more pertinent and entertaining than the White Pages or desktop rolodexes I used to collect. For that, I will happily forgo lifetime control over my status updates.

If we are worried about cyber stalkers, snoops, or helicopter mothers, a Facebook spokesman pointed out obliquely to the Industry Standard, it might also help to adjust our privacy settings.

Marketing Sasha and Malia

Bonnie, you're right about the Obamas not being able to keep their daughters' popularity in a bottle—the girls are just too cute for words—but I do think their parents can protect them by strictly limiting their media exposure and not allowing them to be mass-marketed by J. Crew, Ty Girlz, or any other company looking to profit off Malia's and Sasha's image. It's bad enough to see the president and the first family's picture on every imaginable tasteless piece of memorabilia (what's next, bathroom tissue?). I'd hate to see the girls become so overexposed that their fans turn into haters tired of seeing them everywhere. I think the parents would also do well not to release any more private-moment pictures of them with their girls, such as the ones of the girl's first day of school in D.C. As Emily B. pointed out in a post about those pictures, the Obamas' decision to make them public sent mixed messages about their daughters' zone of privacy. If the first couple consider photos of their girls doing something as mundane as going to school to be public information, why wouldn't the paparazzi try to push the envelope further the next time the girls are out and about in D.C.? (Granted the Secret Service will likely keep aggressive-minded photographers away, but still. ... ) The Obamas' decision to allow the girls to be interviewed on television last summer also surprised me, especially because it was done in the heat of the presidential campaign and because candidate Obama then said he regretted the decision.

I thought it was pretty classy when, after broadcasting a story about the girls' first day of school, one of the networks news anchors announced it would be the station's last story on the girls because they were entitled to their privacy—and their childhood. The station also said it would follow the same privacy guidelines it had adopted for Chelsea Clinton and other past presidential children. The Clintons' were absolutist about keeping Chelsea out of the media spotlight, and I think it served her well over the long-term.   

Palin and Privacy