This Gizmodo story is likely to strike fear into the heart of anyone who tries to maintain multiple and distinct identities on social media. A sex worker named Leilia had two separate Facebook accounts, one for her private life and one for her job. Despite keeping them distinct, with separate email and phone numbers, her friends and family account suddenly started suggesting her work clients as “People You Might Know.” Obviously Facebook’s algorithms had managed to link the data in someway and decided it was all one big happy social network.
Facebook coming up with surprising and unnerving friend suggestions isn’t a new story. This article, posted a few months ago, describes how it figured out the authors great aunt, despite the fact his father had been adopted as child and had no contact with that branch of the family. With the algorithms getting smarter, the amount of data online constantly growing, and neither of them easy to monitor or understand, I’m sure issues like this are going proliferate.
As a software guy, I find the situation somewhat perverse. Traditionally academic computer systems had very strong notions of user identity, because they were shared systems, where personal computers had no concept of it, because they weren’t powerful enough to support it. Companies like Microsoft and Apple worked for years to bring proper identify management and user isolation to PCs. No sooner had they achieved that goal – Windows XP being a major milestone – than smart phones, tablets and social media software arrived and turned everything into a inter-connected soup with no good way to managed different identities.
For now I suspect the only way to handle the problem is to not use the same social media platform with two different identities you wish to keep distinct. So if you have a Facebook account for a friends/family identity, don’t have one for your kink/sex identity. And if you want a tumblr account to share kinky porn, don’t also create a second tumblr account to share holiday snaps with friends. Pick the product most useful to each identity and don’t assume you can keep two accounts on the same platform distinct.
Life was so much simpler before the internet. It used to be only necessary to slip on a masquerade mask and you could attend any fancy ball of your choice in total anonymity.
This is from a shoot for Marie Claire by Koray Parlak and features Nina Reijnders with Victoria Lipatova.
The problem is that hardware and software companies make the assumption that we want to share everything. They also have a philosophy that everything should be linked together. Outside of kink you find that they want to link your fridge, TV and almost everything in your home with each other which to me appears to be an almost Orwellian nightmare. With regard to social media I have discovered that you have to opt out of linking various accounts together. It should be the other way round you should have to opt in to these things.
I suspect that it’s less an assumption or philosophy, and more a critical part of their business model. All their money comes from advertising and advertisers love to know as much about their target audience as possible. I tend to agree that it should be opt in rather than opt out. But I also know from personal experience that an opt in feature gets a tiny take up where an opt out feature gets a tiny drop out. Basically inertia rules, so inevitably companies pick the one most beneficial to them. The only way to fix that is by government involvement, and that’s unlikely to happen in the US (although Europe may be a different story).
-paltego
Your points are well taken, but I am not sure that keeping lives separate by using different forms of social media is a solution. The ability for computer software to form connections is growing exponentially. Consider the frequency with which someone may shop/browse online and suddenly their email address and Facebook page become saturated with advertising. It is only a matter of time before a Tumblr account and a Facebook account are closely linked and once that occurs it is too late to hide one’s identity. It would seem the only solution is to maintain a single identity and leave it at that.
You’re entirely correct. I actually started to say something about that in the post. i.e. Longer term it wouldn’t work as they’ll get smarter about linked data across different products. But then I cut it as the post seemed too long already.
As it turns out, as Ferns pointed out, my suggestion was even less sensible in this specific scenario. The sex worker in question didn’t even have a work FB account. So it was exactly the situation you describe, where they’d linked apparently unconnected data to her single FB account. I just put up a new post with a mea culpa in it.
-paltego
“For now I suspect the only way to handle the problem is to not use the same social media platform with two different identities you wish to keep distinct. ”
The thing about that story is that Leila said she did NOT have a sex worker profile on FB at all: “Her “real identity”…joined Facebook in 2011. Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all”.
I find their lack of transparency about ‘how it works’ appalling. I have had similar experiences and am under no illusion that my real identity is secure. The fact that I have a vanilla presence AND a kink presence on the internet anywhere is enough :/.
“It would seem the only solution is to maintain a single identity and leave it at that.”
Yes. I suspect that as soon as you access ANY sites with the same device you are toast in terms of identities being linked even if you meticulously keep your data separated.
Ferns
You’re completely correct. I didn’t read the original article carefully enough. I thought she had two FB accounts, but you’re right. They linked random other contact data to her private FB one. I just put up another post to address this. Thanks for catching me on this.
The issue of transparency is an interesting one. That probably deserves another post to itself. As a tech person in this field I find it a fascinating problem space, but as an end user it’s very problematic. It’s incredibly difficult to control what data is shared even for the most technical savvy user, even when companies behave correctly
– and that’s certainly not always the case – https://gizmodo.com/oneplus-admits-it-was-snooping-on-oxygenos-users-says-1819487335
Thanks for commenting!
-paltego