Local Facebook users lack privacy awareness

By Kang Ye-won

Facebook’s longtime aim for global openness and its aggressive privacy policy have caused controversy in the United States and Europe for the past seven years.

As Korean Facebook users have recently shot up, reaching more than 4.5 million, relative newcomers are not so aware of the given privacy control options and what personal information is bleeding through their daily routine of online social activities.

Last month Facebook reached a privacy settlement with the U.S. government that would require the company to give notice to users before changing the way their personal information is released.

The world’s largest social networking site that has more than 800 million users has also been allowing advertisers to access users’ personally identifiable information when they click an advertisement on their Facebook page, according to the Fair Trade Commission. The company has consistently denied the argument.

“Facebook’s privacy policies have been a big issue overseas but here in Korea the bigger concern is that people are not well aware of the fact that their privacy is being breached through SNS (social networking services),” said Kang Hak-ju, a manager at eStory Lab, a social media strategy consulting firm.

“They tend to assume that the information is encrypted and stored safely and overlook the possibility of how companies can exploit it.”

Korean online users are used to giving their private information such as social security numbers, and home and email addresses to most local websites, including search portals like Naver and Daum and social networking sites such as Cyworld.

The Korean government requires citizens to use their real names when they make comments or post videos on Korean-based websites.

“Korea is probably one of the very few countries with such Internet policies. It actually opens the door for possible misuse of personally identifiable information,” Kang said.

Many early adopters of Facebook are more likely to follow up with ever-changing privacy tools that allow users to select who can and cannot see their full profile pages, wall posts and pictures.

“I have my Facebook privacy setting at the highest,” said a college student in Seoul, who asked for anonymity. “I have full control over what I post online but I don’t think everyone’s aware of (their privacy setting).”

But some question the effectiveness of those changes.

“It’s cool that Facebook offers a page by page, section by section customizable way of tweaking privacy settings but currently it’s gotten so complicated that I think it’s counter-productive,” said Joanne Yoon, a 24-year-old student of the Underwood International College at Yonsei University.

Besides, it’s not always under a user’s control when those sites become more vulnerable to hackers and tech-savvy users.

Just this week, private photos of the man behind Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, were leaked by “hackers” to highlight a bug in the system.

How secure is Facebook Korea?

Launched in 1999, Cyworld has gone downhill ever since Apple’s iPhone entered the Korean market along with numerous U.S.-based social media sites including Facebook and Twitter. Still the leading Korean social networking site was hacked in July, which led to its 35 million users’ personal information being exposed.

“After the hacking incident, I shut down some of my profile sections, including pictures, and changed the password,” said Chung Min-jae, a junior at Yonsei University.

When it comes to openness of information, Chung agreed that Facebook was more interested in that goal than Korean sites.

“I wasn’t as offended as some of my friends were,” Chung said referring to Facebook’s change of default settings to make profile pages open to the public.

Yoon agreed that it’s easier to maintain anonymity on Korean sites than English ones. She uses a variety of social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Google+, a new social networking tool by Google. She also has access to Korean sites such as Kakao Talk, a mobile instant messaging application and me2DAY, a Korean version of Twitter.

“Google+ and these new changes on Facebook overestimate just how transparent and self-present everyone wants to be on the Internet. I think everyone wants at least some level of discretion and some level of privacy,” she said.

Local response to global networking sites

Global social networking sites have had meteoric success. In 2010, the number of unique Facebook users jumped more than 100 percent compared to a year ago and those of Twitter surged at a hockey stick growth rate of 1,107 percent, according to Morgan Stanley’s Internet trend report.

Considering the rapid expansion of the global sites, the Korea Communications Commission sent a letter last December to Palo Alto, California-based company asking for an improvement in its privacy policies.

It specifically asked to inform users about how personal information is collected and to receive consent for its use; in case a third party gets access to the information, the company must let users know about the purpose and the period of use and provide details of the privacy policies in Korean.

Facebook responded saying it will take further “steps” in answering the requests, according to a KCC release in January, but there has been no follow-up since then.

Guidelines for collecting “personally unidentifiable information”

Some experts say Facebook is doing better at securing users’ privacy compared to other sites, but people bring different expectations to various social media sites.

People have set the bar high for Facebook as a social interaction platform for a close-tie group such as friends and co-workers who they interact with in real life, said Sue Moon, an associate professor in computer science, and Web science and technology at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Whereas Twitter is regarded as a news distribution channel in which interactions take place with virtual strangers such as those between a star and fans or a guru and followers.

“Even though Facebook users respond sensitively to its privacy policies, the company takes seriously as to how its data is picked up by a third party, compared to other social media sites,” Moon said.

She cited a case in which Facebook threatened to sue an entrepreneur named Pete Warden, who aggregated publicly disclosed data on Facebook for research purposes. The company argued that he violated its privacy terms by gathering data without permission. And Twitter is following suit by strictly limiting third parties collecting its data, even if they are open to the public.

However, even when those networking sites do not explicitly provide personal information to a third party such as advertisers, they still feed the “personally unidentifiable information” for a profit seeking agenda, according to a research note by the School of Law at Seoul National University.

The personally unidentifiable information ranges from the users’ login record and the type of services they used to the purchase and transaction records to their preference in media, political parties and civic organizations. Now with an increase of mobile access to those sites, users’ locations can be easily tracked too.

“We found that even in the United States and European countries, they’re beginning to establish guidelines for online advertisers who target specific demographics based on personally unidentifiable information,” said Jong Sang-jo and other writers in the report.

The scholars proposed guidelines as follows:

1) Companies or advertisers must notify users about what kind of “unidentifiable information” they collect. 2) Companies should also provide an option to the information provider, whether to opt out from the advertisement. 3) Companies should form agencies to take responsibility over any consumer complaints regarding the use of private information. 4) A national regulator should be set up to monitor those who take the information for their own use.

Kang of eStory Lab echoed the need to monitor the companies and also stressed the responsibility of online users.

“As much as a company is held accountable for the misuse of private information, users need to be disciplined on how to control the information they publish online,” he said.