By Frank Moher
As those of you with way too little to worry about may know, May 31st is Quit Facebook Day. This is a Canadian initiative, once again proving that, while we of the North may not have the entrepreneurial mojo to create much, we sure know how to get all indignant once somebody else has.
The latest Hate on Facebook campaign (following on the “Dang, They Changed the Way it Looks” and the “Dang, They Changed the Way it Looks Again” campaigns) was prompted by news that the company has partnered with three other sites in a customization experiment. On yelp.com, pandora.com, and docs.com, you will henceforth be informed that the site is using public information from your facebook page to personalize your experience. If you don’t like that, you can click a link to opt out. That’s it. That’s what has caused a hue and cry in the geek community, though it has yet to spread very far in the common-sense community.
Now, the fact is that, as a Canadian, you would have to work very, very hard at this point to breach your own privacy on these sites. Pandora is not even accessible from Canada, and yelp — evidently spooked by the controversy — has turned off the personalization feature, making only vague noises about its return “in the future.” That leaves docs.com (Microsoft’s version of Google Docs), which apparently intends to let you embed Word files, spreadsheets, etc., in your facebook feed. Actually, that sounds kind of useful.
But even if docs.com were attempting to suck huge chunks of information out of my facebook account for the personal gratification of Steve Ballmer, it wouldn’t get very far. First of all, note that it can only access information which has been made public; if I’ve chosen to hide my interest in toe-sucking from all but my friends, docs.com will be none the wiser. And I don’t put a lot of personal information on facebook anyway. Why? Because I am not an idiot; if I want to keep something private, I don’t do it by putting it on the internet.
Some argue that unsophisticated users have no idea what they are and aren’t sharing publicly, nor how to control that. Which is true, and which means that what we have here is a teaching moment. Teach your daughter or your Uncle Ted how to use the privacy settings — they’re not nearly as complicated as facebook hysterics make out, and Mark Zuckerberg has announced that they will be made yet simpler. And while you’re at it, try to convince Uncle Ted that the world doesn’t really give a crap about what movies he likes anyhow.
The greatest irony in the great facebook backlash is that a lot of the geeks who are leading it are proponents of Gmail — Google’s in-the-cloud e-mail service. That makes a lot of sense — fuss about whether or not yelp.com knows you like sushi while entrusting your private and business correspondence to a service which — believe it — can be accessed by government snoops without so much as a warrant. It makes you wonder who the real unsophisticated users are.
“Who thinks they’re so important anyway?”
Facebook thinks you’re pretty important. In fact, you’re the product they sell — your information, and your eyeballs. It would be over the top to compare it with literally selling people, that is to say, slavery, but it is none the less a touchy business model.
That’s not to say it can’t work. Google is an example of how if you respect people and adopt a policy of ‘do no evil’, you can actually make loads of money derived from user information. I think it boils down to what the facebook quitters say on their web site : “For us it comes down to two things: fair choices and best intentions.” Google meets that standard while Facebook does not.
It should be easy for those who don’t value their privacy to provide all their data on the open web if they want to. But that’s how the default gradient should be — you should have to go out of your way to lose your privacy, not have to go out of your way to protect it. “Fair choices and best intentions” says it very well.
Facebook is a mecca for voyeurs and hey, I enjoy checking out everybody else’s lives with the best of them. Its rather like gossiping without ever moving your lips. I simply assumed that if I put stuff up on Facebook it would be available, if not to unknown users, at least to advertising partners. How else does Facebook make money? Isn’t the creator of Facebook ridiculously wealthy and barely out of diapers? Unless you’re srewing the country out of deserving taxes and showing off photos of your last cavort in Dubai or your handsome new yacht, there’s really not that much to fuss about is there? Who thinks they’re so important anyway?
I’m not convinced, perhaps because I’ve been a Linux zealot for some years now, that “teaching moments” are the solution to situations which are beyond the very basic effort Windows users are prepared to make using computers. Sensible default values are essential, because many, if not a majority of users don’t even understand the concept.
Listening to Zuckerberg in a piece on the BBC World Service today, it sounds like they’re not going to be tweaking their defaults significantly, instead focusing on making the interface easier to use. But even there, this would not be happening without the recent public outcry, so while I think closing one’s Facebook account in advance of the emergence of a reasonable alternative may be a tad premature, I none the less applaud the message sent.
Where we agree is with regard to not providing much personal info to Facebook. They only really require name and birth date, and they don’t even check up on those (I’m quite old, having been born in the early 1930s. Their sign up system wouldn’t accept dates from the 17th century, or I’d be older still.). Ultimately any privacy policy which includes a provision for change without notice is worthless, so no matter what is said therein, it is safest to regard the info as public from the start.