Managing Your Identity in the Digital Age

The debate over privacy in the Digital Age came to Palo Alto City Hall Thursday night when Congresswoman Anna Eshoo hosted a timely and freewheeling discussion with Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan and technology journalist Larry Magrid.

The topic of internet privacy is vast and often obtuse, but Eshoo offered a simple introduction to the audience in the Council chambers.

“It used to be pretty straightforward to keep personal information private,” she said. “I don’t live in those days or times anymore, and neither do you.”

Child predators on social networks, identity cyber-theft, predatory data mining, invasive online advertising—these are just a few of the issues companies, internet users and governments are grappling with.

One serious challenge for Congress, said Eshoo, is to respect the needs of businesses to make money while recognizing that “there is a public interest in what we do, and we have a responsibility to consumers.”

“We know that we do not want to stifle innovation or new technologies,” she said, “so we’re going to have to strike a balance between all of that.”

Allowing companies to simply police themselves, however, has proved disastrous, according to Larry Magrid.

The recent revelation that iPhones can be tracked, for example, is a major privacy breach, he said.

“There are lots of reasons, both perfectly legitimate and perhaps not so legitimate that we would want people to not know where we are,” he said. If you were attending an important business meeting, for example, you wouldn’t want Apple to know where you are, he said.

He also cited Sony Playstation’s data breach earlier this month, which compromised 77 million people’s personal information when a hacker broke into their system.

“What happened at Playstation is a little like walking down the street and having something come down and hit you from the sky,” he said.

His message to Eshoo and other lawmakers is simple: “What can we do to make  sure that these companies are protecting our privacy?”

At Facebook, the realm of privacy takes a different shape—less about passwords and credit card numbers, and more about photos and other sensitive biographical data that, if inappropriately shared, can prove embarrassing, costing a user a job, ruining a marriage, or negating a school’s offer for admission.

As Chief Security Officer for the largest social network in the world, Joe Sullivan’s job is to make sure Facebook users have the tools they need to protect that information and, if for any reason they feel it has been inappropriately shared, that they can resolve that problem swiftly.

“My job at Facebook is to help build trust,” said Sullivan.

80 percent of parents and teens who both use Facebook are also Facebook friends, he said, which suggests that parents are playing an active role in monitoring their kids’ behavior online.

Sometimes, however, online safety takes more than just monitoring.

“I think that safety is something that you don’t always think about overtly, you think about it in the back of your mind. When you’re walking down the street, sometimes you get that warning tingle on the back of your neck,” he said. “You also need to have that warning tingle online.”

Facebook has made a decision to help parents with that “warning tingle,” especially in regard to child predators. If an adult tries to friend a number of minors at once, that person is flagged and investigated by Facebook’s security team.

Furthermore, Facebook has remained vigilant about weeding out false identities on their network.

“When Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, he made that decision on day one, that people would have to use their real names,” said Sullivan. “We spend a lot of money finding false identities and cancelling those accounts.”

Sullivan went on to discuss invasive advertising, saying that Facebook, unlike many other online services, does not track your movement from page to page across the web and then target ads accordingly. Rather, ‘contextual’ advertising targets users based on the content they’ve provided voluntarily.

“The only ads we offer are the ads on Facebook,” Sullivan said. Nike, for example, can target the demographic they want to advertise to, like soccer moms in Palo Alto, but they would never learn anything about the identity of Facebook users.

Facebook users, and especially minors, do, however, need to be concerned with managing their identities carefully. Making a seemingly harmless jab at someone online, for example, can cause a ripple effect that can be traumatizing for another person.

Congresswoman Eshoo said that in the end, it is up to every user online to know their privacy rights, and to exercise them.

“Today, there are probably more things that are documented that then end up becoming consequential for someone down the road,” she said. “Those of us who grew up without these technologies had a lot more privacy, because for the most part it was the spoken word or the whispered word about someone. So I guess my advice is: watch what you’re doing.”