An Alternative View of Privacy on Facebook
By Christian Fuchs. 2011
84 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The predominant analysis of privacy on Facebook focuses on personal information revelation. This paper is critical of this kind of research and introduces an alternative analytical framework for studying privacy on Facebook, social networking sites and web 2.0. This framework is connecting the phenomenon of online privacy to the political economy of capitalism—a focus that has thus far been rather neglected in research literature about Internet and web 2.0 privacy. Liberal privacy philosophy tends to ignore the political economy of privacy in capitalism that can mask socio-economic inequality and protect capital and the rich from public accountability. Facebook is in this paper analyzed with the help of an approach, in which privacy for dominant groups, in regard to the ability of keeping wealth and power secret from the public, is seen as problematic, whereas privacy at the bottom of the power pyramid for consumers and normal citizens is seen as a protection from dominant interests. Facebook’s privacy concept is based on an understanding that stresses self-regulation and on an individualistic understanding of privacy. The theoretical analysis of the political economy of privacy on Facebook in this paper is based on the political theories of Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas. Based on the political economist Dallas Smythe’s concept of audience commodification, the process of prosumer commodification on Facebook is analyzed. The political economy of privacy on Facebook is analyzed with the help of a theory of drives that is grounded in Herbert Marcuse’s interpretation of Sigmund Freud, which allows to analyze Facebook based on the concept of play labor (= the convergence of play and labor).
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Privacy & Security, Social Sciences & Humanities
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Clinical Psychology
In Communication
In Sociology and Political Science
- Yejin Choi
- Rowan Zellers
- Ali Farhadi
- Bernhard Rieder
- Jack Hessel
- Ximing Lu
- Noah A. Smith
- Stefano Cresci
In Privacy & Security
In Social Sciences & Humanities
Citations in the corpus
- MERLOT RESERVE: Neural Script Knowledge through Vision and Language and Sound (2022, background): “For example, internet platforms profit off of user data, whereas users do not share equally in these profits [37].”
- Studying Facebook via data extraction: the Netvizz application (2013, background): “Following Fuchs’ critique [6] of the onesided emphasis on a narrow definition of privacy, I would like to argue that research ethics navigate in a field defined by a number of tensions and competition between different ideals.”