Say Ello to the new privacy debate on social media
With consumers increasingly concerned about their personal data on social media Luke Heemsbergen of the University of Melbourne looks at new ad-free platform Ello, and what it will mean for the privacy debate in a cross-posting from The Conversation.
Ello is new social networking space on the web that is receiving a lot of attention of late – so much that it’s caused a few problems with the website out of action from time to time.
Ello’s new popularity is in part because it offers a different view to representing and monitoring our digital selves than Facebook. But Ello’s own privacy/public tradeoff is still evolving, and can teach us a lot about what privacy means online, and how contextual integrity, not just “personal integrity” matters.
Ello is a social networking platform that does not require people to use their real name when they sign up for an account (by invitation only at the moment). It protects users’ patterns of use (their metadata) from Google. It does not sell any member information to third-parties such as advertisers. In fact, the free service promises to remain ad-free forever.
Instead, Ello offers an artistic and vaguely grown-up vibe (nudity is OK) with lots of white space, monospaced font, and is the hottest place to be on the web at the moment (if you still haven’t been invited, then ping me).
Hello Ello
Created in January 2014, Ello exploded onto the social media scene in late September after some of Facebook’s LGTBQ community in San Francisco were forced into becoming vocal and eloquent opponents of Facebook’s real name policies.
The reasons for not wanting real name identities in social media are varied, but taken together, they rally against Mark Zuckerberg’s oft quoted claim that:
[…] having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.
But people who disagree with Zuckerberg’s vision for personal “radical transparency” in social life (online or off) are starting to look for alternative places to be social.
The alternative to Facebook that Ello offers seems closer to the wild west of the internet’s past: it’s experimental, run by the community for the community, and openly fumbling as it goes along.
The serious privacy concerns voiced by creatrixtiara a member of ello’s own community (who fled from Facebook) is one such fumble.
[…] there are specific elements of Ello’s privacy settings, deliberately designed, that make Ello actually way more unsafe than Facebook, Twitter, or other social media outlets and CMSes. And in our rush to embrace a Facebook replacement we need to be aware of what we are at risk for when using Ello.
That original post – and creatrixtiara’s final post on Ello – generated plenty of interest with updates available here.
In short, creatrixtiara calls out that there is currently no privacy in Ello! Everything posted is public. There are no controls to adjust who sees what and who contacts whom. As Ello’s documentation states (for now):
Ello is a platform built for posting and sharing public content. You should assume that anything you post on Ello other than private messages will be accessed by others. Search engines will be able to see the content you post. Content you post may be copied, shared, or re-posted on Ello and on other parts of the internet in ways that you and we cannot control.
Complete publicity for all posts provides a different set of expectations than the 1.1 billion people of Facebook are accustomed to.
This creates a cognitive dissonance of Ello being worse and better than Facebook at the same time. It also allows us a better understanding of how privacy works: Privacy is contextual and Ello is still building its own context.
Privacy is contextual
Privacy expert Helen Nissenbaum remarks on the need to tie “adequate protection for privacy to norms of specific contexts, demanding that information gathering and dissemination be appropriate to that context”.
She calls this contextual integrity. That is to say, contextually specific presumptions of privacy are tied to common practices of appropriateness and flows of information. Breaching (or changing) these practices is what violates privacy.
In short, context matters for what you share and how it’s shared. This is as true offline as online. Conversations among close friends are different in context, content and expectations of sharing than remarks given in a public domain.
As of publication, Ello has sent an email to its users stating that “the ability to block specific users from looking at your Ello feed and profile, and from commenting on your posts” is coming soon. The context of communicating and privacy on Ello are not yet written.
What is of interest as we navigate our personal identities is that Nissenbaum’s requirement for “contextual integrity’ flies in the face of Zuckerberg’s absolutist version of personal integrity.
Contextual integrity thinks about the integrity of the community and the platform rather than just the person. It understands that measures of decency, etiquette, sociability, convention, and morality are created not dictated. Ello’s growing pains are showing us an example of how these are created.
For more information on Ello’s (evolving) privacy policy you can read its aptly named privacy “wtf”, which is of course, fully public.
The irony of all this is that as the who’s who of the internet’s social media rush to adopt Ello, they are mostly doing so with their real names.
What makes Ello special, however, is that the people who do sign up under their real names, don’t have to. And they might also be singing up under pseudonyms, which allow them to create new vibrant communities publicly, without worrying about an ideal from Silicon Valley about absolutist personal integrity.
Luke Heemsbergen is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
It’s going to interesting exactly how it earns any money without ads and without understand its user base…
User ID not verified.
Revenue is from users – additional features above the base offering come in a pay per use / subscription model. Think micro transactions in mobile games.
User ID not verified.
The reality is that Ello has taken VC funding. This means someone, somewhere, is expecting to get a return of ~10x their money. Despite the best intentions of the founders, investors ultimately control what’s going to happen to Ello.
I struggle to envision a scenario where the ultimate outcome is not that user data is monetised in some way. User payment is extremely unlikely – we’ve recently seen that the niche social network App.net struggled to get enough paying users to stay afloat. The costs of running a large social network are not insignificant. Diaspora is a decentralised social network that would have overcome that issue – however it got the timing off by a few years, when it launched the media didn’t quite understand why the current system was broken.
It’s fantastic the mainstream press have jumped on Ello – it’s brought the very important issues of online identity, data-ownership, and privacy to the forefront. I just hope that once Ello’s flavour-of-the-month has worn off, the discussion will continue.
User ID not verified.
I welcome this fresh take on building social communities. Facebook is aging rapidly as a service and Ello may well create some positive friction.
I think even if there model as yet is not defined apart from @Nate’s comments the idea or the value proposition of Privacy is an interesting position.
Considering how much of the Web has been built on Advertising and selling slices of consumer insight through the analytics and more … it will be fun to watch and see if Ello become Byes of fly’s!
#iamsonotacopywriter
User ID not verified.
I can see that Ello offers an interesting alternative to Facebook. Not having to use a real name can be a benefit to some, such as the article above references, and the original article here; http://notyourexrotic.tumblr.c.....o-makes-me
It’s worth noting that the original article talks about Creatrix Tiara “fleeing” Ello, not Facebook. As she rightly states, she doesn’t use her real name on Facebook and whilst they have a real name/one identity policy, it’s not exactly policed.
Like many I struggle to see the network being fully funded by people paying for services, it can and has happened in markets like China through the sale of functionality and stickers etc, but I don’t see that happening in the west.
I also struggle with the complete lack of privacy settings…
As a parent I look at what I post on Facebook and I don’t want that shared with the world at large. Whether it be photos of me on a night out with friends, or pictures of my son. The idea of anyone being able to look at all of my social content is far more concerning to me than a brand being able to track my preferences.
When you read the sites manifesto and interviews with the founders they create a furore about advertisers sitting and looking at your data and messages, where as anyone in ad tech will tell you it’s all ones and zeros and individual profiles don’t get looked at in the way they portray. This is something the advertising community needs to tackle and work on, the education behind tracking and what brands use that for.
The scaremongering around what brands can see and how they track behaviour is much more aligned with data security and identity theft, that’s the message these groups use to scare consumers into not using Facebooks messaging app or any of the crap that is spouted by this movement (“they can record all you calls” “they can use your camera without asking you”) blah blah blah…
…anyway, the real risk on data security and identity theft has to be far more considerable on a site with no privacy settings, where anyone can see everything you share and everything you write. I am not saying Facebook is perfect, and it’s likely to get worse with Atlas’s new functionality and the ability to track across the web using FB profiles and not cookies, but to me there seems a far greater risk in Ello.
User ID not verified.
@NH
Yes – If something’s free. You’re the product.
User ID not verified.
Advertising and user experience are at the opposite ends of the social media fulcrum.
Ello’s primary selling point is that it doesn’t have ads. You lot need to ask yourselves, “why is that a PRIMARY selling point?” Hopefully the answer will leave you feeling very uncomfortable.
Ello will be successful (the invite only is a nice marketing touch), then its owners/backers will get greedy, introduce ads and eventually the platform will die, paving the way for a new ad free service.
User ID not verified.
I used ELLO a few weeks ago for around 10 minutes, they are going to need to do A LOT if they want to get this product out of BETA and to make it a popular network users will actually keep using. At the moment it reminds me of the early days of Tumblr.
They did take around 500k funding at the start of the year as well so that will probably pay for some servers and dev time yet once the money runs out they will need to sell data or sell something to keep the site running or it will be running rounds of Debt funding like Facebook in the early days.
User ID not verified.
Can not believe there’s a topic that’s eclipsed day-to-day Kardashian brunch reports. “Ermagerd, Ebola, we are all going to die!” The quantity of narrow-minded individuals in the world is astounding.
User ID not verified.