Recent grad's honors thesis is 'fit to print' in NY Times

An undergraduate honors thesis rarely makes the news, but recent Legal Studies graduate Chris Peterson’s paper, “Saving Face: The Privacy Architecture of Facebook,” was featured in an article about the online community’s privacy options on the New York Times website on June 29.

Peterson, who is currently a summer researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, is revising the paper for publication, but his subject is throwing a few curves.

“The problem is Facebook technology is a moving target (they’ve completely overhauled their privacy settings over the last few weeks that concorded with many of my suggestions, so my paper has lost a good deal of oomph),” he wrote in an e-mail. He’s also trying to find “a venue that is amenable to such a cross-disciplinary piece.”

According to Peterson, a new feature at Facebook piqued his curiosity and led his Commonwealth College research project supervised by Ethan Katsh and Alan Gaitenby of the Legal Studies Department.

“I was out at Facebook visiting a coder I knew and he showed me the Friends List feature they were rolling out later that day,” he said. “I went home that night and tried to group all of my Facebook Friends into discrete lists. It turned out to be really, really difficult. That got me interested in how people thought about privacy on Facebook, and what the problem was. From there, it turned into a pretty wide-ranging exploration. I started with this very small, simple interest (‘Can the Friends List be used to help people practice privacy’) to this pretty broad discussion about behavioral economics, competing conceptual theories of privacy, human-computer interaction, etc. Every time I read something, it cited 10 more things that completely changed my perspective.

“I only wish I’d had more time! With another few months or a year, this would’ve been a dissertation. The version I handed in was about 100 pages, and that was after cutting 30 or more.”

While he was writing the paper, Peterson contacted a professor in New York who had written about Facebook privacy and asked for advice. “He liked the paper, suggested some changes, and blogged about it. That blog showed up on the radar of someone at the Berkman Center, who sent it out to the mailing list. Someone on the mailing list liked it and Tweeted about it. That Twitter account was subscribed to by the guy from ReadWriteWeb.com, whose column is syndicated to the Times. So you never know where things will lead, so just try whatever might help (or even things that you don’t think will help! Because they might!)”

After the Times piece appeared, his “server got hammered with a couple thousand downloads of the paper,” but the whole experience was “pretty cool,” said Peterson. “I’ve had some stuff I did featured in mainstream media publications before, but usually just profiles of pranks I pulled on the Internet, nothing like a treatment of serious academic stuff though. I just hope I haven’t peaked too early!”

Right now, he’s viewing his newfound fame as an opportunity. “I’m just hoping that I can capitalize on it, get my ideas out there, and make the world a better place,” said Peterson. “I was lucky enough to get a pretty broad platform and I figure I shouldn’t let it go to waste.”

Come fall, he’ll be starting full-time position at MIT, doing web strategy and communications for its admissions office, which is trying to go paperless over the next five years.

“Beyond that, I imagine some more school is in my future,” he said. “Not sure where though. I’m considering law school or grad school, but the options are endless. I’ve been entertaining the idea of grad school for public policy, for behavioral science, or for human-computer interaction. They’ll all lead me in different directions. I’m lucky enough to have a job, so I have the luxury of taking a few years to contemplate my future. Right now I’m just sort of enjoying life.”

Photo courtesy of Chris Peterson

More Information

Read the Times article

July 7, 2009.

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