HomoTech: Facebook Users Beware

Brad Higgins doesn't use Facebook anymore. Unlike most of his peers, the 23-year-old former student at University of Nevada-Reno doesn't want to "friend" anyone, does not he harbor even the slightest urge to "like" anything on the network. He wouldn't even allow EDGE to print his real name because, as he says: "The internet has a long memory."

Higgins blames the social network giant for an episode in which he was threatened by his father to renounce same-sex relationships or sever family ties. Higgins hasn't spoke to his father since October, making the last two months of last year and the first two months of 2013 lonely.

It all started one evening last fall, when Higgins joined the Q Club.

"I thought it would be safe because the Q Club isn't recognized by the school," he told EDGE. "I knew how my father would react if he ever found I was gay. And I was convinced that if he was ever going to find out it would be from me, when I felt he was ready and I worked up enough nerve."

Less than 24 hours later, Higgins' cell phone was ringing. The caller ID read "Dad." Thinking nothing of it (his father, recently retired, called often) Higgins picked up the phone and all hell broke loose on the other end of the phone. "He was yelling and just saying venomous things," he recalls. "There was no calming him down. This was a one-way conversation. He told me, in not so many words, 'You can't be this, son. You have to walk away from that life or walk away from this family.'"

Higgins joins many other Facebook users who have been inadvertently outed. Despite safeguarding personal information, both on and off Facebook, the secret that they are LGBT is discovered.

Accidental Outing

An article in The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 13, 2012 - around the time that Higgins' relationship with his family crumbled - detailed how Bobbi Duncan and Taylor McCormick were outed on Facebook. The president of the LGBT choir at the University of Texas-Austin had added their names to the choir's Facebook discussion group, which made the two students casualties of a privacy loophole. The choirmaster had no idea that listing Duncan and McCormick as part of the group, the software would automatically tell their Facebook friends that they were now members of an out-gay chorus.

Duncan, 22, considered herself a sophisticated Facebook user who had attempted to use its privacy settings to shield some of her activities from her parents. She said she cried all night on a friend's couch. "I felt like someone had hit me in the stomach with a bat," she recalled.

Technology has rendered obsolete the conventional definition of personally identifiable information. Privacy as we know it is disappearing one download, post or friend request at a time.

Facebook officials have routinely stated that the company is committed to the principle of one identity for users. It has shut down accounts of people who use pseudonyms and multiple accounts, including those of dissidents 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 it sells to advertisers - namely, access to real people.

McCormick was studying to become a pharmacist when the choirmaster accidentally outed him. McCormick had come out in July 2011 to his mother but not to his father, whom the son describes as a member of a conservative church that teaches homosexuality is sin. In what he calls a "privacy lockdown" on posts that his father could see, McCormick set his Facebook controls accordingly. "We have the one big secret when we're young," he told the Journal. "I knew not everyone was going to be accepting."

Like many campuses, U.T.-Austin offered a safe space for LGBT people to come out without their parents knowing. It was with that understanding that Duncan and McCormick attended the first rehearsal for the Queer Chorus. According to Christopher Acosta, the chorus' then-president, the two did well. Duncan had agreed to play piano, and McCormick surprised the chorus with his bass. That night, Acosta added the two to the chorus' Facebook page. When he created the group, Acosta had left the security setting "open," meaning both membership and content are public.

"I was so gung-ho about the chorus being unashamedly loud and proud," Acosta said. But what he didn't know - and many millions of others still don't - is that when a page creator adds a member, a notice is generated that can appear on friends' Facebook pages. So when Acosta listed Duncan and McCormick, Facebook posted a note to their friends - including their fathers -that they had joined the Queer Chorus. The social network essentially overrode the intent of the privacy settings both students had used to hide such posts from their dads. Facebook's online help center explains that open as well as closed groups are visible to the public and will publish notification to users' friends. But it doesn't let users pre-approve their addition to a group or to conceal it from friends.

Like Higgins' father, Duncan's dad was enraged and called repeatedly that night. He threatened to stop paying her car insurance and told her to go on Facebook and renounce the chorus and the "gay lifestyle." On his Facebook page two days later, he wrote: "To all you queers. Go back to your holes and wait for GOD. Hell awaits you pervert. Good luck singing there."

Duncan says she was depressed for weeks. "I couldn't function," she said. "I would be in class and not hear a word anyone was saying."

According to public statements, Facebook has over 1 billion active users worldwide. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, millions are unaware of the extent to which their information is available. Privacy critics like the ACLU say Facebook has slowly shifted the defaults on its software to reveal more information about people to the public and to the company's partners.

Chris Cox, Facebook's vice president of product, said in an August 2011 interview that it had added more privacy controls "because that encourages people to share." So if you are LGBT and not out to your family, and a Facebook so-called friend (often never met in real life) photographs you at a gay bar and posts the photo, there is nothing you can do about it. Even if that person doesn't tag you, someone is bound to see it and find out your secret.

According to a survey in the spring of 2011, many people don't know how to use Facebook's privacy controls. The survey found that while U.S. users were more actively controlling their online presence by taking steps such as deleting comments posted by others, about half reported difficulty in managing privacy controls.

Privacy researchers have said that by increasing privacy settings, companies like Facebook give users an "illusion of control." Through a series of controlled experiments in 2010, Associate Professor Alessandro Acquisti at Carnegie Mellon University found that offering people enhanced privacy settings generated a form of overconfidence that, paradoxically, makes people share too much.

Evidence also exists that social media and networking can become an addiction. Finding and responding to information on social media can give the brain a surge of dopamine. Each dopamine "hit" reinforces addictive compulsion. (The same mechanism as with many addictive drugs.) Massachusetts Institute of Technology media scholar Judith Donath told EDGE, "Cumulatively, the effect is potent and hard to resist."

What troubles some is that a higher percentage of gay men are addicted to drugs and alcohol compared with heterosexuals. Social networks are no different. According to Cosmedia Consulting, 73 percent of gay adults in the U.S. use Facebook, versus 65 percent of heterosexuals. A Cosmedia survey found that nearly one-quarter of gay and lesbian respondents are members of LinkedIn, versus only 16 percent of straight people. Twitter is used by 29 percent of gay men and lesbians, compared with 15 percent; 55 percent of gay men and lesbians visit social network sites at least once a day, while only 41 percent of heterosexual adults are on the sites that often.

In the U.S., the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual will include "Internet addiction disorder," or IAD. Several other countries have already accepted IAD as a psychological diagnosis, and it is being treated as "a grave national health crisis" in some. The idea of quitting cold turkey proves to be near impossible for most people.

Making Matters Worse?

On Jan. 15, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg officially announced Graph Search. The new feature (which remains in beta) will "give people the power and the tools they need to search through the content on the site," Zuckerberg said.

Graph Search is an overhaul of Facebook's search box. It lets people type in naturally phrased queries to get personalized results. It is not the same thing as Web search. One difference is that it does not use keywords. It's a structured search that lets users type in natural phrases such as "friends of friends who like Dorothy," or "Friends who went to White Party," or "restaurants in West Hollywood my friends liked."

Facebook now hosts content from nearly a billion people and has 240 billion photos.

The addition of a powerful search tool could bring to the surface information that was once buried. Users may not remember all the things they've "liked" in the past, and some of those things could be pretty distasteful.

Once you post something to Facebook, chances are good that you will see it again, with or without your permission, somewhere. Zuckerberg has said that the capability to share information will change our identities. But we're already seeing that.

In an interview for the 2010 book The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick, Zuckerberg said, "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." Facebook users, he added, have "one identity."

Here are some facts compiled by EDGE that you probably don't know about Facebook:

� Internet addicts have 10 to 20 percent smaller brain areas in the locations responsible for emotion, speech and motor control, as well as sensory and other information.

� Researchers have linked ADHD and hostility to Internet addiction in children. ADHD has risen 66 percent in the U.S. in the past 12 years.

� In violation of Facebook's requirement that members be at least 13-years-old to open an account, about 7.5 million users in the U.S. are under 13, and about 5 million are under the age of 10, according to a 2011 report in Consumer Reports.

� Consumer Reports also estimated that 4.8 million people have used Facebook to say where they planned to go on a certain day (a broadcast to burglars) and that 4.7 million "liked" a Facebook page about health conditions or treatments - details an insurer could theoretically use against you.

� Almost 13 million users told Consumer Reports they had never set or didn't know about Facebook's privacy tools. And 28 percent shared all, or almost all, of their wall posts with an audience wider than just their friends.

Shaun Knittel is an openly gay journalist and public affairs specialist living in Seattle. His work as a photographer, columnist, and reporter has appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout the Pacific Northwest. In addition to writing for EDGE, Knittel is the current Associate Editor for Seattle Gay News.

This story is part of our special report: "HomoTech". Want to read more? Here's the full list.