The Facebook privacy hoax is making the rounds again. You know the one; it is practically impossible to not have stumbled across some variation on the theme in your newsfeed. These posts, with their almost-official-sounding language forming a big block of text, have been around for years, and while their specific wording and typos may vary, they all have one fundamental thing in common: They don’t work. Nothing you can say in your profile can override whatever you already agreed to in Facebook’s terms of service.
John Oliver did a Last Week Tonight, for-Facebook-only segment on these hoaxes on Wednesday, informing viewers that “unfortunately, you might as well be posting this picture of a sloth revealing a woman’s cleavage, because it would grant you the same legal rights.” Many of these messages cite the Rome Statute, which established the international criminal court so, case you need this spelled out, is not relevant; some, as Oliver points out, misspell this as the “Rome Statue” which, yeah, is also irrelevant.
THE FACEBOOK PRIVACY PROTECTION MESSAGES ARE HOAXES! WATCH THIS VIDEO TO HEAR JOHN OLIVER EXPLAIN HOW TO ACTUALLY PROTECT YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION.
Posted by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on Wednesday, September 30, 2015
The last wave of these went up in January; before that, you probably saw them in early December, or as far back as 2012. Hoaxes on the internet abound, though they usually make a single appearance before disappearing into the digital ether, never to be heard from again. (Miss you already, Alex from Target!) What makes the Facebook copyright hoax unique is that, like cicadas or straight-across-bangs, it keeps finding its way back to the mainstream.
Why is the Facebook hoax so powerful? Because underneath the fiction of it — can’t stress this enough: these statements have zero real legal power — is a very real feeling that people don’t trust Facebook, or any social media site, to actually protect whatever information users think is worth protecting. Facebook’s privacy settings are confusing as all get-out; as soon as you can figure out exactly how those settings operate, Facebook just changes them without warning. Often. Even a fairly tech-savvy user can have a hard time keeping up.
Americans value privacy but fear privacy no longer exists; a 2014 survey by Pew Research Center found that 88 percent of adults on social networking sites “are concerned about third parties like advertisers or businesses accessing the data they share on these sites, and 70 percent of social networking site users “are at least somewhat concerned about the government accessing some of the information they share on social networking sites without their knowledge.”
Most adults express a desire to take additional steps to protect their data online: When asked if they feel as though their own efforts to protect the privacy of their personal information online are sufficient, 61 percent say they feel they “would like to do more.”
Young people reportedly care even more than older people about online privacy, maybe because, as internet natives, they appreciate that an online life is not something you can ignore or, really, opt out of if you want to be a modern, employed, friend-having citizen.
The Pew study also indicated that nearly two-thirds of adults believe the government should do more to protect people’s personal information. The technical means of protecting yourself from snooping eyes — the NSA, Facebook, hackers, what have you — are “not going to work for most people,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the New York Times in 2014.
That Mr. Robot-level stuff is beyond the capacity of the average social media user, and besides (the widespread sentiment seems to be), why should you have to be a hacker to protect yourself on the internet? “I think more needs to be done at the macro policy level to restore trust: update federal privacy laws, limit circumstances under which government gets access and mandate better security,” Rotenberg said.
Which explains the appeal of the copyright hoax: It appears to satisfy the desires of most social media users. It looks like one of those “macro policy level” solutions to this personal problem. If only it were actually real.