1. Dr. Michael Zimmer Jenna Willoughby
Word Frequency
Timeline of Zuckerberg on Privacy
2006 –
2008 –
2009 –
2010 –
2014 –
“When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better.”
A focus on “helping people become more open, sharing more information.”
“Our philosophy that people own their information and control who they share it with has remained constant.”
“We announced this open privacy setting where prior to that it was impossible for someone to take their profile and say that they wanted it to be open. Now they can do that. They can say its open to everyone.”
“If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a worlds that’s more open and connected is a better world.”
“What people want isn’t complete privacy. It isn’t that they want secrecy. It’s that they want control over what they share and what they don’t.”
“I think the right thing is to make it so that certain information, by default, is always private.”
“But, a core tenant of Facebook has always been control. From the very first version of the site, we built privacy controls that every single piece or information that you put on the site you could see exactly who saw it… now… there’s one master control… you go to your privacy page, you can say in a few clicks, I want all the content I share on a day-to-day basis to be visible to only my friends. That’s what I want.”
“… if we want, there’s more out there that we can go look at and research and understand what’s going on with the people around us. I just think that leads to broader, kind of, empathy, understanding, um, just a lot of kind of good human things that make society function better.”
“They just set the level of privacy that they want to have. And then that’ll exist for a long time and no more changes.”
“What makes Facebook fun and useful is that there’s a lot of information about a lot of people that you can get but what's important is that the information is available to the people who that person wants that information to be available to.”
Methodology
A qualitative data analysis software called Nvivo is used to analyze the transcripts of all public utterances by Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The sources include articles, blog posts, books, earnings call, interviews, letters and press events that are coded in nodes of dialogue by Mark Zuckerberg and questions that prompted Zuckerberg to speak. The questions are then further coded into nodes of advertising, artificial intelligence, bias in the newsfeed, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, financial, future of Facebook, general, Internet.org, IPO, Jarvis, personal, privacy, social graph and virtual reality (Oculus). Queries can be ran on the data, such as word frequency, that can be grouped by exact matches (talk), stemmed words (talking), synonyms (speak), specializations (whisper), and generalizations (communicate). Other queries include identifying frequently occurring terms, searching for content based on how it is coded, and cross-tabulating how content is coded.
“The Zuckerberg Files is an archive of all public utterances of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. It includes over 200 transcripts and bibliographic data of all publicly-available content from representing the voice and words of Zuckerberg, including blog posts, letters to shareholders, media interviews, public appearances and product presentations, and quotes in other sources. The archive also includes over 100 videos of Zuckerberg’s public appearances.”
- Dr. Michael Zimmer
Coding for privacy
“Control, when people feel comfortable sharing information and they feel like they have control over [over] what they share and who they share it with, people become comfortable sharing more things, right.”
- Mark Zuckerberg, 2010
Dr. Michael Zimmer
Jenna Willoughby
Privacy Node
Abstract
Social networking sites like Facebook have a daily impact on nearly every person in society as they shape social interactions and identities. These SNS hold a lot of personal information, such as characteristics, interests, and relationships, so it is important to analyze their policies on information privacy. The Zuckerberg Files is all publicly available content from Mark Zuckerberg including articles, interviews, press events, earnings calls, letters to shareholders and Facebook posts. Transcripts were uploaded to the qualitative data analysis software called Nvivo and then coded for questions and quotations by Zuckerberg. The questions were then further coded for advertising, AI, financial, future of Facebook, Internet.org, privacy, virtual reality, and so on. Using Nvivo, we queried the data to see where particular content reoccurs and find exact matches of the content or find stemmed words, synonyms and generalizations. The software also allows us to find the most frequent words in the transcripts and for Zuckerberg the most frequent words are “people”, “think”, “Facebook”, and “know”. In this project we are concerned with privacy, so I can easily go to the “privacy” node and see every source of data that is talking about privacy. I can easily locate the quote from Zuckerberg, “I think the right thing is to make it so that certain information, by default, is always private” (Heussner, 2010). Although Mark Zuckerberg himself does enact online privacy policies, Facebook is undeniably a major influence in SNS and sets the precedence for future privacy policies.
Analysis
As the founder, Mark Zuckerberg has been speaking on Facebook’s privacy policies since the beginning, but his views on privacy has evolved as the company has. As a computer software engineer, Zuckerberg’s discourse was fragmented and nervous, but his opinions on people’s rights of their data online was genuine and honest. He even admits, as he began to create actually policies he realized how much harder it is to stay fair and just. Influenced by corporate figures, Zuckerberg’s personal views on privacy began to change to reflect a profitable company. Constantly throughout Facebook’s evolution, Zuckerberg has believed in giving people the option to decide who sees their posts. While he believes that open sharing of information will help the world become more connected, others are a little more private with what they choose to share. To this day, people have many options in their settings to choose if everyone can see their posts, just their friends, or friends of their friends as well. Being the largest social networking site, Facebook has a difficult job in pioneering the laws of online data privacy. Zuckerberg, being a unique founder, CEO, and face of the company, has great influence over the privacy policies and analyzing his discourse on the subject reveals the power of privacy should be in the hands of the users.
“Today, Facebook has more than 1 billion active users who, each day, share nearly 5 billion items, upload 350 million photos and click the “like” button more than 4.5 billion times.”
– Dr. Michael Zimmer