If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you’ve seen me flood the pipes with multiple status updates about how unhappy I am with FB’s latest round of privacy and API changes. In case you don’t, allow me to summarize:
I find Facebook to be irresponsible with my personal data. The unbelievably popular website started off just a few years back as a service that only showed your data to people you affirmatively declared to be your friend. As can be seen by visiting the EFF’s page, over the past five years, Facebook has eroded into a dense data warehouse, stocked with all of the likes and dislikes that we, the user community, have dutifully plugged in every day. Details from the mundane, (like lunch selections), to the potentially incredibly personal (witness Facebook’s recent code gaffe that exposed your private chats and pending friend requests to anyone on your friend’s list) have all been archived and stored in Facebookâs data farm.
In short, given the amount of personal data available on Facebook and taken with Facebook’s cavalier attitude about privacy and their technical screw-up’s, people should be a lot more worried about this then they actually seem to be. I’ve come to the conclusion that Dan Yoder was right in his article on Gizmodo . Facebook doesn’t care about your privacy, and even if they did, they’re not competent enough to be trusted with it.
However, that only addresses the technical aspects of privacy, while avoiding the philosophical dimension. Has Facebook committed an ethical breech with its users? Facebook certainly doesn’t think so. Every time the topic comes up that Facebook would have a lot fewer users at the gate with pitchforks if they’d just make everything opt-in, someone from Facebook glibly mentions that the entire system is opt-in, by virtue of the fact that you aren’t forced to use the system at all, nor are you obligated to post.
I disagree with that statement. While technically true, Facebook is overlooking the fact that they have created a system used by almost half a billion people. To a large percentage of those people, Facebook IS the web, much like AOL was in the 90’s, and to those people, Facebook is as essential a part of their day as electricity and running water. When you create a utility like that, you have to undertake it with the knowledge that you are a steward of your user’s data, not the owner of it. Facebook will tell you that you do own your data. If you’d like to test that though, go look for the "export my contact list" button on Facebook. You’ll be looking for a long time. Facebook re-creates the walled garden metaphor from the AOL’s and Compuserve’s of the world. Someone else creates the content, but Facebook acts like they own it by not letting you take it elsewhere easily, and by selling it to advertisers.
And yet…I still have an account there, and will continue to for the time being.
Before I get into the why’s of that statement, let me say that I’ve gone through my privacy settings with a fine-toothed comb, and multiple tools and articles at my disposal. I have a great deal of expertise in tech and social networking, so I’m a little better off than the average user. I’m knowledgeable enough to know that something is wrong here, and also savvy enough to take precautions to guard against my data leaking. I’m still trusting Facebook to not completely screw up, which may or may not be a mistake, so I’m also pulling quite a bit of my information off the site and, in essence, treating it like Twitter. I don’t post anything there anymore with an assumption of privacy. I assume anything about me can and will be sold at some point to the highest advertising bidder. I’m comfortable with my decisions, and confident that this is the right choice for me.
The reason I’m giving Facebook another chance is because they’ve now launched an internal debate on privacy, and I’ve seen some interesting statements coming from their people. They are looking at simplifying their privacy settings and creating "bands of privacy" that will be simple to configure by the most technically-challenged folks. I desperately want to see Facebook get it right, because I don’t see any other product right now that has the personal utility for so many people as Facebook does. They just need to figure out how to be less evil-genius and head more towards being faithful caretakers of our personal data.
Will it be enough? Lots of people don’t think so and argue that what we need is more granularity, rather than simplification. While I think that’s appropriate fro some people, I don’t think it’s right for the lay person. Too much granularity, and my Mom will throw up her hands and walk away. Too little, and you get the uproar we have right now.
I would argue that what we need instead is transparency and simplicity. Facebook would cut their privacy woes dramatically if they used plain talk and openness. For example, rather than putting in checkboxes for every possible scenario, put in a drop box that says "Do you want any information about you to be visible to people that aren’t your friends?", with three answers – "Yes", "No", "Customize this for me" – with a default of "No". Build the rest of your settings off that simple choice. For people that say "no", make everything opt-in. For the I-Live-In-Public crowd that chooses "Yes", make everything opt-out. And then hide the custom and granular controls that the OCD-types like myself want behind a different control panel.
Tell the users EXACTLY who and what gets their data, and give them the choice globally. Tighten up your security practices, work on the bugs in your system, and embrace letting user’s have control (including the extraction and deletion of it if they so choose). It would go far in the eyes of the people who care if we knew what was going on. A lot of us live on Twitter, Facebook, and every social network out there. We’re moving towards a less private, more socially connected world, and that’s amazing and laudable, but we’ll only get there when the right people make the right choices. Facebook is close to that Nirvana.
Disagree? Well, there’s always this site if you’re still contemplating Facebook suicide.
