Covering those who surrender privacy without thinking

Kathleen Bartzen Culver teaches journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

IN 24 SHORT HOURS, I ACCIDENTALLY AMPUTATED my husband from a family photo, inadvertently set my status to “looking for a relationship” and made a colleague blush by saying a student had “poked” me.

Welcome to the world of Facebook, an online social networking site that has dramatically increased my connections with students, while teaching me hard lessons about privacy and inaccuracy online.

As I trip my way through this amazing new experience in connectivity I keep coming back to a question far more serious than my own Facebook follies. As journalists, what do we do when subjects have surrendered their privacy online and can no longer try to reclaim it?

Many would immediately think, “Miss New Jersey,” the beauty queen who spent time this summer trying to retain her crown in the face of threats to reveal Facebook photos of some less-than-queenly behavior.

But for me, the far more important test came when news organizations linked to the Facebook and MySpace profiles of students who died in the Virginia Tech massacre. The reporters and editors I spoke with in that time told me it was a commonsense decision to direct audience to information that enhanced understanding of the victims. The principle reaction from my students? An outraged “How can they do that?”

The disconnection lies in how kids view social networking online. They’re living out loud, but they see themselves doing that within a smaller social circle, not in a massive community comprising all Web users.

That felt naïve to this 40-year-old, until I started Facebooking myself. It’s easy to lose sight of how viewable you are when you’re networking online. You receive feeds updating you on your friends, and you can quickly succumb to the illusion that only they receive your updates. But unless you set specific controls, everyone in the world sees when you add a favorite quote or upload photos of your latest vacation.

And most of these kids have set up their accounts when they’re barely able to conceive of how it might adversely affect them. The same feelings of invincibility that prompt them to drive too fast make them think, “No one’s ever going to look at me.”

The question for journalists, then, is when it’s fair game to dig into networking profiles when reporting and when it’s appropriate to point audiences to them. Some would instinctively answer “always” twice.

But I see this as a complex ethical decision-making process, no different than, say, deciding whether to name a victim or accept material a source has come by illegally. In using information from social networking profiles, we are treading on space most users view – rightly or wrongly – as semi-private. We must take into account that they may well have surrendered their privacy without thinking first. And when they are no longer able to move to regain that privacy, this calculus becomes even more important.

For my students, and for me, linking to the Virginia Tech victims’ Facebook and MySpace profiles felt like letting the world into their dorm rooms and opening their top desk drawer. The victims had no voice, no way of closing the drawer.

And I never grew convinced that the information available added significantly to understanding the victims and their legacies. In fact, had I died within my first weeks on Facebook, readers may well have mistakenly concluded I was trying to off-load my husband.

I encourage my students to take back a bit of their digital life, to ramp up their privacy before a time comes when they wish they had. Some are beginning to listen.

Just last week, a student told me she was sickened when a friend died and her online network crawled with people seeking details on him. She contacted another friend, provided her password and wrote, “If anything ever happens to me, delete my Facebook profile immediately.” *