Privacy in the Age of Facebook: Discourse, Architecture, Consequences
Mark Zuckerberg at the Facebook Developer Garage, SXSW 2008 (photo credit Kate Raynes-Goldie)
Long before ChatGPT, my PhD asked why Facebook was built the way it was. The answer wasn’t just money. It was a belief system. Fifteen years on, those same beliefs are driving the AI rush. Since it was published in 2012, it’s consistently been in the top 10 most downloaded from Curtin University library.
Citation: Raynes-Goldie, K. (2012). Privacy in the Age of Facebook: Discourse, Architecture, Consequences. PhD. Curtin University, Perth, Australia.
https://www.kateraynesgoldie.com/s/privacy-in-the-age-of-facebook-kate-raynes-goldie.pdf
Fifteen years on: what my research saw early, and what it reveals about today
1. Facebook completely changed the internet and how we use it.
In the internet’s early days, most of us went by handles, screen names and playful profile pictures. Facebook changed that. It made bringing our real names, faces and relationships online the norm. As Zuckerberg put it in 2010: “Up until recently, the default on the Web has been that most things aren’t social and most things don’t use your real identity.” One person in my study had never used the internet to socialise before Facebook. Within a few years, it was central to her social life. Today, that’s most of us. Our social lives now run through platforms built on one company’s idea of how people should connect.
2. Our lives and friendships became AI’s training data.
Facebook wasn’t just built for profit. It was built on a belief that a more open, transparent world would be a better one. My research called this radically transparent sociality. The thinking is that more sharing would make the world better. My research documents how Facebook was intentionally designed and iterated to get us all adopting radical transparency, whether we liked it or not. We had no idea it was also being used to train AI. In 2024, Meta admitted to an Australian Senate inquiry that it trains its AI on Australian adults’ public posts going back to 2007, with no way to opt out. Now Zuckerberg is pitching “personal superintelligence” that “knows us deeply”, delivered through glasses that see what we see and hear what we hear. What we shared with our friends became raw material for machines.
3. We traded connection for an audience, and authenticity for performance.
Facebook got us used to watching and being watched, all the time, by everyone we know. Before Facebook, we showed up differently with different people: our boss, our mum, our best friend. On Facebook, they all became “Friends”. Researchers call this “context collapse”. At the same time, keeping up with friends turned into quiet, constant surveillance. Users called it “creeping”. Once we knew everyone was watching, we started performing a perfect self for every audience. Now that performance is the default, offline too. Especially for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who’ve never known any other way of being in the world.
4. The AI rush is driven by beliefs most of us have never heard of
Why the frantic push to get AI into everything? To most people, it doesn’t add up. That’s because the AI rush isn’t just about money. It’s being driven by a bundle of beliefs critics now call TESCREAL: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism. To its true believers, AI is the path to solving humanity’s problems by creating a machine god, merging with it and living forever. The heads of every leading AI lab, from OpenAI to Google DeepMind, have embraced at least one aspect of these beliefs.
These beliefs aren’t new. My 2012 PhD documented them when they were even weirder, more niche and more fringe: the Singularity, transhumanism and a Silicon Valley faith that sees the world, people included, as code. In this thinking, a digital world is a better world: open, efficient and transparent. My research showed how these beliefs also shaped Facebook, which set out to build a digital version of our social world and turned our relationships into data. Zuckerberg likened it to indexing our brains. As he put it in 2010, most of what we care about is in our heads, “not out there to be indexed”.
Fifteen years on, these beliefs are driving AI adoption. They’ve gone mainstream without most of us realising. Facebook got us to create digital versions of our social networks and identities. For the AI elite, the next step is merging our digital and human selves into one. As, Sam Altman has written that our best chance of surviving superintelligence is to “merge” with it.
5. None of it was inevitable. Neither is AI.
It feels like we’re always being told the future has already been decided. It’s called technological determinism: the belief that technology drives change on its own, and the rest of us just have to keep up. My research was written to challenge it, documenting its influence in Silicon Valley thinking since the 1940s. In 2010, Zuckerberg said our new openness online was “just something that has evolved over time”. Two years earlier, he’d boasted that Facebook “got people through this really big hurdle” of sharing their real names, photos and connections. Facebook wasn’t the way it was because of the technology. As my research put it, it was “a result of the belief system baked into it by its creators”.
Technology is never neutral. It’s made by people, and it carries ours beliefs and biases. My PhD showed that technologies of all kinds reflect the ideologies of their makers, both good and bad.
AI can be different. So can the future.
About Dr. Kate Raynes-Goldie
Grounded in nearly 25 years’ experience and a PhD in internet studies and cultural anthropology, Dr Kate Raynes-Goldie is an expert in the deeply human capabilities of connection, curiosity and play in an increasingly technological world. In the age of AI, they’re the critical skills that drive adaptability, innovation, problem solving and creativity. A cultural futurist and human capability speaker, she has presented on five continents, including at TEDxPerth and SXSW, and writes a long-running tech and innovation column for the Business News.
For Researchers
Abstract
Most academic and journalistic discussions of privacy on Facebook have centred on users, rather than the company behind the site. The result is an overwhelming focus on the perceived shortcomings of users with respect to irresponsible privacy behaviours, rather than an examination of the potential role that Facebook Inc. may have in encouraging such behaviours. Aiming to counterbalance this common technologically deterministic perspective, this thesis deploys a multi-layered ethnographic approach in service of a deep and nuanced analysis of privacy on Facebook, which included interviews with users as well as Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO. This approach not only looks at both the users and creators of Facebook, it examines Facebook Inc. in the context of historical, cultural and discursive perspectives. Specifically, this thesis details how the company’s privacy policy and design decisions are guided not simply by profit, but by a belief system which which encourages “radical transparency” (Kirkpatrick, 2010) and is at odds with conventional understandings of privacy. In turn, drawing on Fiske’s model of popular culture, users “make do” with the limited privacy choices afforded them by the site, while at the same time attempting to maximise its social utility. As this dynamic demonstrates, Facebook Inc. plays a critical, yet often overlooked role in shaping privacy norms and behaviours through site policies and architecture. Taken together, the layers of this thesis provide greater insight into user behaviour with respect to privacy, and, more broadly, demonstrate the importance of including critical analyses of social media companies in examinations of privacy culture.
Information which might be useful for Facebook, social media & privacy researchers
In Chapters 3 and 8, I expand on my definition and application of social privacy as distinct from institutional privacy (which I first wrote about in in 2010) — that is, the management of information and disclosure about oneself in the context of one’s friends, acquaintances, co-workers — as an important concept in understanding privacy behaviours and attitudes on Facebook.
In Chapters 5, 6 and 7, I provide the origins, manifestations and consequences of the philosophy of Facebook — or what I call “radically transparent sociality,” which essentially explain why Facebook doesn’t want to protect the privacy of its users.
Chapter 4 provides a comprehensive chronological overview of Facebook’s history and evolution from 2004 until 2011.
Throughout the thesis, particularly in Chapter 8, I show how the idea that youth are privacy unconcerned (sometimes described as the “privacy paradox“) is an oversimplification, and is largely inaccurate.
Citation: Raynes-Goldie, K. (2012). Privacy in the Age of Facebook: Discourse, Architecture, Consequences. PhD. Curtin University, Perth, Australia.
https://www.kateraynesgoldie.com/s/privacy-in-the-age-of-facebook-kate-raynes-goldie.pdf