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Intelligence
Zuck You, Facebook .…

Intelligence

Zuck You, Facebook .…

May 14, 2010By Michael Stoner

Maybe you’ve read that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, believes that privacy is so, like, over. And since he believes that none of us should care about privacy any more, he and his colleagues are doing everything that they can to foist their envisioned reality onto Facebook’s millions of users. Facebook has continued to push the envelope on privacy, changing its approach multiple times, each time creating a brouhaha.

This time its serious.

I’m talking about the uproar caused by Open Graph. By adding a snippet of code to your website, you can allow Facebook users to “Like” it, revealing their preference to their entire social network. Its instant personalization that allows essentially any web page with the embedded code to become a Facebook page. Zuckerberg describes it as connecting people to things. 

This is mighty powerful stuff. Alex Iskold has a terrific piece on the implications of Open Graph, which you should read.

Instant personalization could be great for marketers. To understand how cool it is, read Andrew Gossen’s thoughts about the implications of Open Graph for alumni relations on AlumniFutures. It’s a must-read, in that he clearly outlines the benefits for a university in Facebook’s new tools.

On the other hand, brave new worlds seldom emerge without a few problems here and there. Michael Fienen pointed out that this might not be so great for marketers after all.

And there are still more problems. One of them is security. Last week, MacWorld pointed out that even if you opted out of instant personalization on Facebook, sites could install unwanted apps in your profile. Yesterday, TechCrunch reported security issues with Facebook’s Open Graph and Yelp.

Though Facebook moved quickly to address these problems, there will be more to come.

And, more significantly, there’s a growing backlash against what many view as an assault against privacy by Facebook. At the very least, Facebook has changed the way its users can protect information and decide who they want to share it with; Facebook used to allow users to restrict views of their private info, but these controls have largely been eliminated—and what remains are vastly more complicated—in the push toward instant personalization.

With this move, Facebook appears to have lost a huge amount of credibility, not to mention trust, within the tech community and among early adopters. Wired.com called for “an open alternative to Facebook. And Jason Calacanis wrote a blistering blog post about how Facebook has overplayed its hand.

Read the comments to Facebook executive Elliot Schrages interview with the New York Times to get a sense of how angry people are, if you havent been following the controversy. And it’s not just early adopters or techies: even regular people are concerned: ReadWriteWeb noted that “How Do I Delete My Facebook Account” was a fast-growing query on Google.

Yesterday, Facebook held an all-hands meeting to discuss the issue. Many people, including me, were curious about what might happen. But strangely enough, though Facebook wants everyone else to be transparent, theres no news from the meeting.

The end of privacy, or a new beginning?

I can understand how Facebook benefits from Open Graph, since it essentially turns the web—including my sites and yours—into one huge extension of Facebook. If you implement the Open Graph code. I can see how marketers benefit from having access to Facebook’s millions of members and their networks. I can even imagine how users could benefit.

But count me among those who resent how Facebook has forced users to accept its vision of a Facebooked web without allowing individuals to make the choice about whether this is something we want to opt into. The only apparent recourse is to leave Facebook or to maintain a minimal profile. Or to use an app like The Green Safe to lock up your information and make sure that you can control how and what is shared.

No lectures, please: Facebook has the right to whatever it wants to do with the information formerly considered to be “private.” And I don’t need any reminders from those who say “It’s the Internet & anything you put out there isn’t private any more.” I’ve been online for a long time; stuff I posted in the 1990s is still findable.

This isnt just some old-fogey notion of privacy. Sam Jackson posted his thoughts about his expectations of privacy. Privacy isnt a simple concept.

In fact, I find danah boyd’s (@zephoria) perspective on this particularly illuminating. Privacy isnt dead—the value of being public has changed:

Privacy is about having control of a situation. Its about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. Its about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me public by default, private when necessary but this doesnt suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.

This week, the New York Times reported on Diaspora, a new social network that, unlike Facebook, will provide privacy controls for users. The self-described nerds behind this project are in their early 20s.

And if you’re interested in deleting your Facebook account, here’s how. Facebook’s own instructions are tedious and cumbersome. Wonder why?

Update: In this post, Andrew Careaga offers links to posts that I didn’t mention or didn’t see when I wrote this. And I hadn’t seen his post before mine went live, or I would have linked to it!

Update: There’s so much going on that I could update this every 15 minutes and still not be up to date. But danah boy’ds post on Facebook and Radical Transparency is a must-read. And confirms that people just don’t understand how widely their information can be shared.

Update; Patrick DiMichele posted some thoughtful remarks about privacy on Facebook.


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?