Mr. Turakhia
Article of the Week
Name _______________________________
AoW 10.15.12
When the Most Personal Secrets Get Outed on Facebook
By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER
AUSTIN, Texas—Bobbi Duncan desperately wanted
her father not to know she
is lesbian. Facebook told
him anyway.
group by a friend without their approval. As a result,
the two lost control over their
secrets, even though both were
sophisticated users who had
attempted to use Facebook's
privacy settings to shield some of
their activities from their parents.
One evening last fall, the
president of the Queer
Chorus, a choir group she
had recently joined,
"Our hearts go out to these
1
inadvertently exposed
young people," says Facebook
Ms. Duncan's sexuality to
spokesman Andrew Noyes.
her nearly 200 Facebook
"Their unfortunate experience
friends, including her
reminds us that we must continue
father, by adding her to a
our work to empower and
Facebook Inc. discussion
educate users about our robust
Taylor McCormick was outed after he was added to
a Facebook group that automatically informed
privacy controls."
group. That night, Ms.
friends he had joined a choir, Queer Chorus, at the
Duncan's father left
University of Texas, Austin.
vitriolic2 messages on her
In the era of social networks like
phone, demanding she
Facebook and Google Inc.'s
renounce3 same-sex relationships, she says, and
Google+, companies that catalog people's activities for
threatening to sever family ties.
a profit routinely share, store and broadcast everyday
details of people's lives. This creates a challenge for
The 22-year-old cried all night on a friend's couch. "I
individuals navigating the personal-data economy5:
felt like someone had hit me in the stomach with a bat,"
how to keep anything private in an era when it is
difficult to predict where your information will end up.
she says. Soon, she learned that another choir member,
Taylor McCormick, had been outed the very same way,
upsetting his world as well.
Many people have been stung by accidentally revealing
secrets online that were easier kept in the past. In
The president of the chorus, a student organization at
Quebec, Canada, in 2009, Nathalie Blanchard lost her
the University of Texas campus here, had added Ms.
disability-insurance benefits for depression after she
Duncan and Mr. McCormick to the choir's Facebook
posted photos on Facebook showing her having fun at
group. The president didn't know the software would
the beach and at a nightclub with male exotic dancers.
automatically tell their Facebook friends that they were
After seeing the photos, her insurer, Manulife
now members of the chorus.
Financial, hired a private investigator and asked a
doctor to re-evaluate her diagnosis, according to Ms.
Blanchard's lawyer.
The two students were casualties of a privacy loophole4
on Facebook—the fact that anyone can be added to a
Ms. Blanchard didn't realize her photos were visible
publically, according to the lawyer, who added that
1 Inadvertently: unintentionally
depressed people often try to disguise their illness to
family and friends. Ms. Blanchard sued to have her
2 vitriolic: very mean and nasty; burning; heavily acidic
benefits reinstated. The matter was settled out of court.
renounce: to refuse to follow, obey, or recognize any further;
to give up, refuse, or resign usually by formal declaration
3
loophole: a small opening; an ambiguity or omission in a rule
that allows someone to avoid following the rule
4
personal-data economy: businesses based on the buying and
selling of personal information
5
Source:
The Wall Street Journal
October 13, 2012
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578008740578200224.html
Mr. Turakhia
Article of the Week
A Manulife spokeswoman
declined to discuss the
case, saying "we would not
deny or terminate a valid
claim solely based on
information published on
websites such as
Facebook."
Losing control online is
more than a technology
problem—it's a
sociological turning point.
For much of human
history, personal
information spread slowly,
person-to-person if at all.
Name _______________________________
When Joining a 'Group' Reveals Too Much
How Facebook Shares Users' Memberships With
Their Friends Online
 Someone creates a 'group' on Facebook
around a shared interest or activity.

If the group's creator sets it to be 'open,' other
Facebook users can see its activities.

The creator has the ability to add his or her
Facebook friends to the group.

Getting added generates a notice that can
appear on their friends' Facebook pages—
alerting others to their membership.

People added to a group this way have the
option to leave, but are first added by default.
The Facebook era,
however, makes it possible
to disclose private matters
to wide populations, intentionally or not. Personal
worlds that previously could be partitioned6—work,
family, friendships, matters of sexuality—become
harder to keep apart. One solution, staying off
Facebook, has become harder to do as it reaches a
billion people around the world.
Facebook is committed to the principle of one identity
for its users. It has shut down accounts of people who
use pseudonyms and multiple accounts, including those
of dissidents7 and protesters in China and Egypt. The
company says its commitment to "real names" makes
the site safer for users. It is also at the core of the
service they sell to advertisers, namely, access to the real
you.
Closeted gays and lesbians face particular challenges in
controlling their images online, given that friends,
family and enemies have the ability to expose them.
In Austin, Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick, 21,
deliberately tried to stay in the closet with their parents,
even as they stepped out on campus. Ms. Duncan's
6
partitioned: divided into parts or different sections
He set Facebook controls for what he calls a "privacy
lockdown" on posts that his father, in San Antonio, could
see. "We have the one big secret when we're young," he
says. "I knew not everyone was going to be accepting."
UT Austin was more accepting. As many university
campuses have for years, it offered a safe space for
young people to come out without parents knowing.
Last fall, Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick attended the
first rehearsal for the Queer Chorus, a group for gay,
lesbian and transgender students and their allies.
"This is a great place to find yourself as a queer
person," says the chorus's then-president, Christopher
Acosta. The group is known for renditions of pop
songs in which it sometimes changes the gender of
pronouns. Ms. Duncan agreed to play piano and sing
alto. Mr. McCormick, who has a slight frame, surprised
the chorus with his deep bass.
fundamentalist: a movement or attitude stressing strict and
literal adherence to a set of basic principles (in this case, a
strict reading of the Bible)
Source:
The Wall Street Journal
As she struggled with her
sexuality, she adjusted her
Facebook privacy settings to hide
any hint of it from her father,
whom she had helped sign up for
Facebook. "Once I had my
Facebook settings set, I knew—
or thought I knew—there wasn't
any problem," she says.
Mr. McCormick, studying to
become a pharmacist, came out in
July 2011 to his mother in his
hometown of Blanco, Texas, but
not to his father, whom Mr. McCormick describes as a
member of a conservative church that teaches
homosexuality is sin.
8
dissident: someone disagreeing with an established religious
or political system, organization, or belief
7
parents home-schooled her and
raised her in Newton, N.C.,
where the family attended a
fundamentalist8 church. Now a
linguistics student, she told her
best friend in the summer of 2011
that she might be gay.
October 13, 2012
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578008740578200224.html
Mr. Turakhia
Article of the Week
At the rehearsal, on Sept. 8, Mr. Acosta asked if any
members weren't on the chorus's Facebook group,
where rehearsals would be planned. Mr. McCormick
and Ms. Duncan said they weren't.
That night, Mr. Acosta turned on his MacBook Pro and
added the two new members to the chorus Facebook
group. Facebook, then and now, offers three options
for this sort of group: "secret" (membership and
discussions hidden to nonmembers), "closed" (anybody
can see the group and its members, but only members
see posts), and "open" (membership and content both
public).
Mr. Acosta had chosen open. "I was so gung-ho9
about the chorus being unashamedly loud and proud,"
he says.
But there was a trade-off he says he didn't know about.
When he added Ms. Duncan, which didn't require her
prior online consent, Facebook posted a note to her all
friends, including her father, telling them that she had
joined the Queer Chorus.
When Mr. Acosta pushed the button, Facebook allowed
him to override the intent of the individual privacy
settings Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick had used to
hide posts from their fathers. Facebook's online help
center explains that open groups, as well as closed
groups, are visible to the public and will publish
notification to users' friends. But Facebook doesn't
allow users to approve before a friend adds them to a
group, or to hide their addition from friends.
After being contacted by The Wall Street Journal,
Facebook adjusted the language in its online Help
Center to explain situations, like the one that arose with
Queer Chorus, in which friends can see that people
have joined groups.
Facebook also added a link to this new explanation
directly from the screen where users create groups.
"I was figuring out the rules by trial and error," says Mr.
Acosta.
9
Name _______________________________
A few hours later, Ms. Duncan's father began leaving
her angry voice mails, according to Ms. Duncan and a
friend who was present.
"No no no no no no no," Ms. Duncan recalls telling a
friend. "I have him hidden from my updates, but he saw
this," she said. "He saw it."
Ms. Duncan's father didn't respond to requests for
comment for this article.
Her father called repeatedly that night, she says, and
when they spoke, he threatened to stop paying her car
insurance. He told her to go on Facebook and renounce
the chorus and gay lifestyles.
On his Facebook page, he wrote two days later: "To all
you queers. Go back to your holes and wait for GOD,"
according to text provided by Ms. Duncan. "Hell awaits
you pervert. Good luck singing there."
Ms. Duncan says she fell into depression for weeks. "I
couldn't function," she says. "I would be in class and
not hear a word anyone was saying."
Mr. McCormick's mother phoned him the night his
name joined the Queer Chorus group. "She said, 'S—
has hit the fan…Your dad has found out.' I asked
how," Mr. McCormick recalled, "and she said it was all
over Facebook."
His father didn't talk to his son for three weeks, the
younger Mr. McCormick says. "He just dropped off the
face of my earth."
Mr. McCormick's father declined to participate in this
article.
Privacy critics including the American Civil Liberties
Union say Facebook has slowly shifted the defaults on
its software to reveal more information about people to
the public and to Facebook's corporate partners.
"Users are often unaware of the extent to which their
information is available," says Chris Conley, technology
and civil-liberties attorney at the ACLU of Northern
California. "And if sensitive info is released, it is often
impossible to put the cat back in the bag."
gung-ho: extremely or overly zealous or enthusiastic
Source:
The Wall Street Journal
October 13, 2012
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578008740578200224.html
Mr. Turakhia
Article of the Week
Facebook executives say that they have added
increasingly more privacy controls, because that
encourages people to share. "It is all about making it
easier to share with exactly who you want and never be
surprised about who sees something," said Chris Cox,
Facebook's vice president of product, in an interview in
August 2011 as the site unveiled new privacy controls.
Facebook declined to make Mr. Cox available for this
article.
Name _______________________________
"Facebook is one of the few tech companies to make
this a priority," she says.
Mr. Acosta, the choir president, says he should have
been sensitive to the risk of online outings. His parents
learned he was gay when, in high school, he sent an
email saying so that accidentally landed in his father's
in-box.
Still, privacy advocates say control loopholes remain
where friends can disclose information about other
users. Facebook users, for example, can't take down
photos of them posted by others.
Today, he says, his parents accept his sexuality. So
before creating his Facebook group, he didn't think
about the likelihood of less-accepting parents on
Facebook.
A greater concern, they say, is that many people don't
know how to use Facebook's privacy controls. A survey
conducted in the spring of 2011 for the Pew Research
Center found that U.S. social-network users were
becoming more active in controlling their online
identities by taking steps like deleting comments posted
by others. Still, about half reported some difficulty in
managing privacy controls.
"I didn't put myself in that mind-set," he says. "I do
take some responsibility."
This past September, the National Football League
pulled referee Brian Stropolo from a game between the
New Orleans Saints and the Carolina Panthers after
ESPN found a photo of Mr. Stropolo wearing a Saints
jacket and cap that he had posted on Facebook.
Some young gay people do, in fact, choose Facebook as
a forum for their official comings-out, when they
change their Facebook settings to publicly say,
"Interested In: Men" or "Interested In: Women." For
many young Americans, sexuality can be confidential
but no longer a shameful subject. Sites like Facebook
give them an opportunity to claim their sexuality and
find community.
It remains unclear whether the photo was intended to
be public or private. An NFL spokesman said, "I don't
believe you will see him back on the field." The NFL
declined to make Mr. Stropolo available.
For gays, social media "offers both resources and risks,"
says C.J. Pascoe, a Colorado College sociology
professor who studies the role of new media in teen
sexuality. "In a physical space, you can be in charge of
the audiences around you. But in an online space, you
have to be prepared for the reality that, at any given
moment, they could converge without your control."
Privacy researchers say that increasing privacy settings
may actually produce what they call an "illusion of
control" for social-network users. In a series of
experiments in 2010, Carnegie Mellon University
Associate Professor Alessandro Acquisti found that
offering people more privacy settings generated "some
form of overconfidence that, paradoxically, makes
people overshare more," he says.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has long posited10
that the capability to share information will change how
we groom our identities. "The days of you having a
different image for your work friends or co-workers
and for the other people you know are probably coming
to an end pretty quickly," he said in an interview for
David Kirkpatrick's 2010 book, "The Facebook Effect."
Facebook users have "one identity," he said.
Allison Palmer, vice president of campaigns and
programs at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation, says her organization is helping Facebook
to develop resources for gay users to help them
understand how best to maintain safety and privacy on
the site.
Facebook declined to make Mr. Zuckerberg available.
10
posit: to propose as an explanation; to suggest
Source:
The Wall Street Journal
October 13, 2012
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578008740578200224.html
Mr. Turakhia
Article of the Week
Days after their outings, Ms. Duncan and Mr.
McCormick met at the campus gender-and-sexuality
center, which provides counseling. On a couch, they
swapped tales. "I remember I was miserable and said,
'Facebook decided to tell my dad that I was gay,' " she
says. "He looked at me and said, 'Oh really, you too?'"
Mr. McCormick's mother, Monica McCormick,
meanwhile, was worried how the Facebook disclosure
might affect her business selling insurance. "Every kid
in this town now knows," she says. "I am sure that I
have lost clients, but they are not going to tell you why.
That is living in a small town."
Mr. McCormick and his father eventually talked about
his sexuality over an awkward lunch at a burger joint
and haven't discussed it much since. But Mr.
McCormick feels more open and proud about his
sexuality. He changed his Facebook profile to
"Interested In: Men."
After Ms. Duncan's Sept. 8 outing, she went through
long periods of not speaking with her father.
Name _______________________________
For a while, Ms. Duncan's mother moved into her
daughter's apartment with her. "I wanted to be with
her," says her mother, who is also named Bobbi. "This
was something that I thought her father had crossed the
line over, and I could not agree with him."
Speaking of Mr. Duncan, she says: "The big deal for
him was that it was posted and that all his friends and
all his family saw it."
The younger Ms. Duncan says she tried to build bridges
with her father around the year-end holidays. But the
arguments persisted.
"I finally realized I don't need this problem in my life
anymore," she says. "I don't think he is evil, he is just
incredibly misguided."
She stopped returning her dad's calls in May. She and
Mr. McCormick remain in the chorus. Mr. Acosta
changed the Facebook group to "secret" and the chorus
established online-privacy guidelines.
Today, Ms. Duncan has her first girlfriend. "I am in a
really good place," she says, but wouldn't want anybody
Possible Response Topics:

Have you made or read unintentional revelations through Facebook? What were some of the consequences of that
mistake? Did the experience change the way you use Facebook?

The reporter points to a professor who notes, that social media "offers both resources and risks," as "in a physical
space, you can be in charge of the audiences around you. But in an online space, you have to be prepared for the
reality that, at any given moment, they could converge without your control." Are the benefits of using Facebook
worth the risk that your information could become public? Why or why not?

The article points to Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who “has long posited that the capability to share
information will change how we groom our identities.” We seem to be headed towards a society where it is harder
for people to maintain secrets. Do you see any benefits or problems with this movement towards openness?
to have her experience. "I blame Facebook," she says.
"It shouldn't be somebody else's choice what people see
of me."
Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at [email protected]
Source:
The Wall Street Journal
October 13, 2012
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578008740578200224.html