Virtual Trust: FaceBook, Craig’s List, SecondLife ….or Other Handy Ways to Expose Yourself Without Really Being Naked
If you’ve followed techy news at all in the last week you’ve, no doubt, read a bit about the changes in the Facebook site, the security breach in the databases for SecondLife user information, and the latest debacle involving a fake personal ad on Craig’s List turned sex expose’. What do they all have in common? All of these situations have important lessons to teach us about virtual trust in online communities.
I won’t recap the stories of these three events. You can read them here:
- Facebook site
- Mark Zuckerberg, FaceBook CEO, on the new features
- Petition against the news feed feature
SecondLife
Craig’s List (some coverage not safe for work)
We’re watching the digital community mature in its understanding of what it means to really be a community that is partially hidden, obscured, or misrepresented. Groups which are as large as the Facebook population (in the millions) are far too large for any one member to truly know everyone involved and thus there is an assumption that the members we don’t know have something in common with us that makes them trustworthy enough to remain part of the group.
Here’s the metaphor I’ll use to demonstrate levels of trust in a community: Imagine a circle of people holding hands. Each person is in personal contact with at least two other people (the folks to the right and left whose hand they are holding). However, the circle is so large that one cannot see across to view everyone in the circle. We trust, though, that somewhere beyond the horizon where the chain of people continues that there are more and more people like us, holding hands with at least two people they know and that the circle is unbroken, creating a closed, safe space that we’re all invested in keeping “safe” or at least that we all have a common interest in what this space will be and how we want to be able to use it.
Now, got that picture in your head? Let’s apply our circle of people metaphor to recent events regarding online social networking.
Facebook: Facebook is a community of college students (though there is a high school mirror site and alumni are often allowed to retain their .edu email addresses and remain on the site after graduation). Next to MySpace, Facebook is perhaps one of the largest social online networks containing members from nearly every American college and university. You make an account and add people you know on campus to your friends list. You start with folks you really know, no doubt: your roommate, significant other, that guy you study Calculus with. These are the people in the circle with whom you are holding hands. You know them. You can see their faces, feel their hands. You trust who they are and what they’re doing on the site. You list your classes, the hall you live in, where you’re going on Saturday night and you do this with the intention of sharing that information with the people you really know but all the while you’re aware that people ten hands down the line or a hundred hands down the line can also see this information about you. We invest trust in the community when we assume that those people down the line have a similar commitment to the people next to them and thus the whole community, even the bits we can’t see, all have the same investment in the community and won’t treat us any different than they would treat the people closer to them in the circle.
At least, this is how Facebook used to work.
With the introduction of the news feed feature the dynamic of the circle has changed. Now people beyond our immediate view, folks who are fifty or so people down in the circle can, if they wish, get a view of the circle as if they were right next to us. Did we agree to hold hands with these people? Did we enter the circle to be so close to people we’re only mildly acquainted with? What Facebook users need to realize is that, yes, we did. By adding these people who we really don’t know to our friends list we’ve given them the ability to act as if they are right next to us in the community. They’re virtually holding our hand even if we really would prefer they were a few spots down the line from us. They aren’t violating us; the site isn’t violating us; we’re violating ourselves by adding people to a friends list who really aren’t our friends. They may still be trustworthy of maintaining the circle but now they feel a little too close for comfort.
Secondlife: The database breach at Linden Labs, makers of SecondLife, is quite a different beast from the FaceBook situation. Depending on which FAQ you read, the hackers gained access to usernames, passwords, home addresses, and credit card information. It should be said, before I go on, that Linden did a fantastic job of notifying its users about the breach and has been quick to react and forthcoming with information. So, in SecondLife we have a virtual community of users in a sort of shared Utopian hallucination of a world of beautiful clothes, fantastic homes and cars, as well as great thinkers sharing ideas, collaborating, and creating new content on a constant basis. Not all residents are who they appear to be, however, and it should be remembered that some users (I’d estimate half) are there to live a life apart from their real-life existence. This being said, how does my metaphor apply?
To apply the community hand circle to the SecondLife security breach we must add another level to the metaphor: a semi-invisible sphere of security provided by a third party, Linden Labs. Each user entrusts Linden with their personal information (billing address, credit card number…or not if you’re an unverified member which add a whole other layer of thinking to this metaphor that we’ll leave for another time) and in turn we are assured that Linden will protect the community that users are building. The database hack creates a lack of confidence in the shield around the circle so those who were involved start to break ranks, let go, wander around, or leave completely. Users still want to trust the other members of the circle but now there is a dark intruding cloud hanging over the circle that no one wants to deal with. To reestablish the community, Linden will have to work overtime to assure those who remain that the protection is there and stronger than before. Residents can continue to hold hands, look inward at each other, and not have to worry about what is creeping up behind them.
Craig’s List: Sites which cater to a more fringe or taboo topics and populations require a heightened level of community trust. Craigs List hosts ads about apartments for rent, classifieds, and personal ads. It covers as wide a range of topics as users who use it. For this example, we’ll only focus on the explicit personal ads that the site allows. The site is not “safe” like SecondLife is; its membership is not based on a common, verified attribute like FaceBook’s is. It’s a loose community where hand holds are tentative at best and probably best done while wearing a few layers of rubber gloves (or tongs). The circle of people is almost amoeba-like, shifting and floating with the occasional strong handshake and the common cautious brush of fingertips. So what happens when users are naïve enough to take a strong grip on a nearby hand that they don’t really know? The current fiasco, that’s what. The article exposing the real identities of community members who not only grasped a hand they didn’t recognize (who offered sex) but then metaphorically exposed themselves to that person, reveals something critical about our engagement in online communities: trust should be earned. We cannot always assume that the people in the circle have the same motivations that we do. Just because they are in the circle, holding hands, and we can see them we don’t know that they aren’t wearing a mask or merely holding our hand to distract us while someone takes advantage of us from another angle.
What can we learn from these examples? From examining the attributes and reactions of a violated digital community circle? I think we learn something important about the human condition when mitigated by the medium of the internet. We all drift through life establishing contact with other people with whom we share something in common: a job, a political view, an affiliation, a sexual attraction. It’s these shared things that bring us close to each other, even momentarily. We look for these commonalities; we hold on to them, and we make assumptions about those with whom we hold hands and project our own ideas onto those with whom we make contact. It’s human nature to want to make connections. People who engage in online communities are not desperate or naïve. They’re humans engaging in an activity that is innately natural to the human condition. These troubles with online networks serve as eye-opening examples that expose the problems that can arise when a natural inclination is performed in a somewhat foreign or unknown environment.
We still have a lot to learn.
