How the New Facebook Privacy Rules Affect Activists

Yesterday Facebook enacted a new set of privacy rules, the purpose of which is to expand the information which all users share, making it “easier for you to find and connect with the people you’re looking for.”  However, according to a great analysis by the  Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Looking even closer at the new Facebook privacy changes, things get downright ugly when it comes to controlling who gets to see personal information such as your list of friends.  Under the new regime, Facebook treats that information — along with your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of — as “publicly available information” or “PAI.” Before, users were allowed to restrict access to much of that information. Now, however, those privacy options have been eliminated.

These reductions in privacy protection have significant negative consequences for activists, particularly in repressive regimes where they communicate and affiliate more freely online than they can offline.  When Facebook unilaterally removes barriers of privacy, it leaves activists and their contacts open to persecution by authorities.

If you are an activist whose political activities or affiliations are visible through your Facebook account, you need to scrub your account of political content now.  This means:

1. Un-friend fellow activists
2. Leave any political groups you are a member or fan of
3. Delete political status messages, notes, and links and do not add new ones
4. Un-tag yourself from photos of you taking part in political activities or in the presence of known activists
5. Remove any linkages connecting you to politically dangerous people, ideas, or organizations

Even before the new rules came into effect, activists in repressive regimes should have kept their profiles clean.  A state security officer intent on viewing your profile will find a way to do it.  However, now that an activist’s name, profile picture, networks, current city, gender, friend list, and pages are automatically (and irrevocably) displayed, security personnel can use Facebook to map activist networks more easily.

Social media commentators like Evgeny Morozov and activists like Sami Ben Gharbia of Global Voices Advocacy advise activists in repressive regimes not to use Facebook and other commercial social platforms for activism at all because they are so public.  I would recommend caution but not outright rejection of these tools, which are indeed quite powerful.   In some countries the risks of detections will  be greater than the benefits of use, particularly where only a fraction of the population is using these tools, making the audience for activism limited.  However, in other countries activists may choose to continue using Facebook, but with greater caution.  It is possible to make Facebook use safer, but it is impossible to make it entirely safe.

So what are safer Facebook practices?  Other than the profile scrubbing recommended above, it means that activists need to create separate anonymous profiles for their political activities, which contain no accurate personal information and are completely unconnected to their real friends, affiliations, and locations.  In some cases, it may even make sense to create a “throw-away account,” much as activists use throw-away cell phones: create a fake account to do one sensitive action, and then never use it again.  So that a single IP address cannot be connected to you activism account, you should access that account from different public computers in cyber cafes and never from your home computer.

Activists should also refrain from posting anything incriminating on Facebook or creating groups that will endanger less tech-savvy citizens.  Maybe the Egyptian creator of the fictional group “President Mubarak is a Creep” started the group using an anonymous throw-away account, but the Egyptian citizens that join that group may not hide their identities and may thus make themselves vulnerable to persecution.  In this way activists unintentionally create “honey-pots” that ensnare fellow citizens in politically dangerous affiliations.

The competition between activists and repressive government for control of online speech and action is often referred to as a cat and mouse game where activists find ways to undermine and circumvent  blocks put in place by authorities.  However, as Facebook’s new privacy policy illustrates, this is not really a two-player game but a multi-player game.  Companies which create digital infrastructure also have the ability to give the advantage to one side or the other.  Facebook’s move unfortunately gave the advantage to repressive governments.

(cross-posted from DigiActive.org)