The Facebook Fallacy: Privacy Is Up to You

Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told Congress under oath that by providing its users with greater and more transparent controls over the personal data they share and how it is used for targeted advertising, he insisted, Facebook could empower them to make their own call and decide how much privacy they were willing to put on the block. As he surely knows, providing a greater sense of control over their personal data won’t make Facebook users more cautious. It will instead encourage them to share more. This, of course, will produce more data for Facebook to mine to its own financial advantage. “Disingenuous is the adjective I had in my mind,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a leading expert on privacy-related behavior at Carnegie Mellon University. “Fifteen years ago it would have been legitimate to propose this argument,” he added. “But it is no longer legitimate to ignore the behavioral problems and propose simply more transparency and controls.”

“Providing users of modern information-sharing technologies with more granular privacy controls may lead them to share more sensitive information with larger, and possibly riskier, audiences,” researchers concluded. The phenomenon even has a name: the “control paradox.” “Privacy control settings give people more rope to hang themselves,” said behavioral economist Professor George Loewenstein. “Facebook has figured this out, so they give you incredibly granular controls.”