We have found a lot of conflicting data in our research, as Gaurav expressed in his last post on Flickr privacy settings worldwide. Brazil and India seem to favor Orkut, despite differing Geert-Hofstede attitudes towards uncertainty avoidance. Universal McCann found that Americans seem to have fewer contacts and socialize far less online than the BRIC countries, which is odd given that online social networks had a head-start in the US.
In my research model, I am seeing how transparency is the positive compromise between closedness and openness. Geert-Hofstede and Hall’s high- and low- contexts don’t seem to explain different countries’ behaviors satisfactorily. I think my model, which breaks down openness and closedness into different aspects of peoples’ lives, like personal, financial, political, health, etc., helps to explain the contrasts far better, or at least leads me down a more productive line of research.
There is little data to go off since this study is new. I’m not sure we have the time or money to conduct our own surveys or research. But I’d like to hypothesize a bit on what I think is going on regarding social networking in the US and BRIC countries.
For starters, Facebook is taking over the planet (see the SNS map Gaurav posted earlier). In just three months of statistics, Facebook has overtaken the incumbent SNS in 12 different countries. The only other SNS to take over a country is hi5, a self-titled “international social networking company with a local flavor”. Interestingly, Gaurav pointed out to me that it is a San Francisco-based company, but it was started by Indians who moved to SF just to be part of the cluster. According to the Oxyweb SNS map, Myspace is still the leader in the US over Facebook, which says something about how young Facebook is.
Furthermore, the two top SNSs in Russia and China are virtual identical clones of Facebook in most aspects. This says something about the pervasiveness of Facebookism. Imitation is flattery.
So if I were to look ahead into the future, I would have to see Facebook dominating the rest. No other SNS offers as many privacy controls, and while Gaurav insightfully points out that Brazilians and Indians may prefer fewer settings because they are so social, what is most important to me is that Facebook is already thinking the most deeply about what the future will mean for personal data control, privacy, and security.
Facebook is also creating the most sophisticated application platform out there, even if it hasn’t monetized as quickly as iTunes’s application store or Google’s upcoming Android stores. It has barely even begun to open up its data through Facebook Connect, yet it’s already sucking up tons of data from other sites through its import features.
Listening to Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, speak about social networking, you get the feeling that very few people understand as well as he does where this is all going. Public outcries towards Beacon were a surprise to him, because in his mind, it makes more sense if your friends or at least people you trust recommend individual products or brands to you instead of behavioral marketing guesses at what you might like.
I think Facebook will take over because it’s building all the pieces for the future SNS world. While open data control platforms will allow us to jailbreak and move from one SNS to the other easily, what we will begin to value is whichever SNS offers us the best features. No one competes with Facebook in that regard, already.
Privacy Attitudes
So if I am to wonder why Americans are more “private” than the BRIC countries, I hypothesize that it’s because Americans desire personal privacy most, and are not as suspicious of political privacy. That is, even after eavesdropping scandals, most Americans generally believe that they can voice their opinions about the government. However, what Americans seem most deathly afraid of is privacy from employers, peers, and co-workers. This has manifested itself in Facebook’s privacy controls, and a continual onslaught of outcries relating to personal privacy. I would guess that Americans fear a loss of reputation within their professional community more than in their national community. Americans talk a lot of potential employers reading their social networking profiles.
I am thinking there might be two key spheres that affect decision-making then: privacy from government and privacy from society (personal privacy). In my model, health, sexual, and financial privacy would be subsets of personal privacy. Political privacy would stand on its own. Are there subsets of political privacy?
Contrast the US obsession with personal privacy with Chinese internet users. I would assume that not only are Chinese internet users more biased towards well-educated, fairly well-off people than the US online population is, but they also fear actions from their governments more, based on the government actively monitoring what they might post online. This would not change the fact that Chinese are highly social, are very well-connected, and indeed are even far more comfortable meeting strangers online than Americans, whose friend networks are primarily comprised of people they know in person.
And contrast it with Russians, who not only may fear repression by their government for speaking out, but are also less social than Brazil and India.
India could be seen as both highly social and also not afraid of government action. And Brazil would be highly social (Gaurav calls Indians and Brazilians “hyper-social”), but Brazilians seem somewhat afraid of government action (see their recent wiretapping scandals).
Hypothesis Model: Personal and Political Privacy
If these generalizations (and I realize they are highly generalized!) hold, then that would put Brazil and China in the same quadrant, but obviously at different degrees.
Moving Forward
This model seems to present a lot fewer contradictions for me, but I do not want this to seem like blatant stereotypes. The model still leaves a lot of questions.
To what degree are Brazilians afraid of their government? They have had a lot of eavesdropping scandals, but to what degree does the individual care?
Why are Russians seen as being less personally open?
Is there any hard data on any of this?