The predominant analysis of privacy on Facebook focuses on personal
information revelation. This paper is critical of this kind of research and introduces an
alternative analytical framework for studying privacy on Facebook, social networking sites
and web 2.0. This framework is connecting the phenomenon of online privacy to the
political economy of capitalism—a focus that has thus far been rather neglected in research
literature about Internet and web 2.0 privacy. Liberal privacy philosophy tends to ignore
the political economy of privacy in capitalism that can mask socio-economic inequality and
protect capital and the rich from public accountability. Facebook is in this paper analyzed
with the help of an approach, in which privacy for dominant groups, in regard to the ability
of keeping wealth and power secret from the public, is seen as problematic, whereas
privacy at the bottom of the power pyramid for consumers and normal citizens is seen as a
protection from dominant interests. Facebook’s understanding of privacy is based on an
understanding that stresses self-regulation and on an individualistic understanding of
privacy. The theoretical analysis of the political economy of privacy on Facebook in this
paper is based on the political theories of Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas.
Based on the political economist Dallas Smythe’s concept of audience commodification,
the process of prosumer commodification on Facebook is analyzed. The political economy
of privacy on Facebook is analyzed with the help of a theory of drives that is grounded in
Herbert Marcuse’s interpretation of Sigmund Freud, which allows to analyze Facebook
based on the concept of play labor (= the convergence of play and labor).