I Do Not Trust Facebook with My Personal Information
In response to Jason Calacanis’ article titled: “Is Facebook unethical, clueless or unlucky?”, although I’ve never met Mark Zuckerberg, I believe Facebook’s move to open up user information to everyone probably has more to do with its VCs/investors than its founder. The investors are the ones that need returns in a relatively short time period and, with the price that’s been paid by most of them and the existing revenue multiples for media/online advertising companies, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re constantly trying to push the envelope. As for the personal information in question, with all the bots trolling the internet and social networks these days, the large number of Facebook applications that download that information and the number of websites that use Facebook Connect to get access to some of that info, most of the information being referred to is already “semi” publicly available to the people who would tend to misuse it like spammers/hackers/etc.
The government could get involved, but for most people, I would assume (could be wrong assumption) that most of the personal information in Facebook is already available to the public somewhere else on the web, weakening any case the government would have against Facebook. Besides, who doesn’t have pictures of themselves or videos somewhere on the web that are a lot more damaging to their image or privacy than the information in Facebook. With everybody walking around with a GPS device and a camera connected to the Internet, this situation will only get worse.
I do not trust Facebook with my personal information, nor do I trust any other site or online service with my personal information. Call me paranoid. Besides, nothing’s free. The advertising business model implies that the user data will be used for “targeted ads”. I think it’s wishful thinking to believe that the personal information we put in the cloud is private
That being said, what Facebook is doing is wrong. Using an industry standard and the assumed trust that users have in the TOS process to make sweeping changes to a user’s rights is both unethical and abusive behavior, not unlike how monopolies treat their users/customers. Facebook is behaving like a company that firmly believes it has a strong enough position with its users to shove just about anything down their throat without much consequence. Does Facebook believe it has a monopoly position in the social web?
There’s a silver lining here for those of us concerned about the dangerous amount of power that Facebook wields on the social web. By opening up its data to the world, Facebook is at the same time making it a lot easier for competitors to access its users and migrate them to competing services. The value of Facebook is in its data, the fact that it is extremely difficult for users to port their personal information to a competing service, the amount of time spent and regularity of the visits of its members. By opening up the data to search engines and the web, other social networks will now be able to more easily move users to their services along with their data. I believe it is in Facebook’s best interest to remain as closed as possible and keep control of what comes into its kingdom. They already have over 350M+ active users and are still growing double digit year-to-year. Everybody is on Facebook or will be at some point. By opening up to the Internet, it is at risk of morphing into it. Facebook should follow Apple’s model, not Twitter’s. Facebook is an Internet within the Internet that third parties want access to and it should control who/what gets in and when as much as possible, just like Apple does with the iPhone. Facebook’s semi-openness is its biggest asset. Opening up will cause its demise.
JS Cournoyer
comment by iPhilly
Nice post! It reminded me of this article I read where underage students were drinking and posting these pictures randomly on Facebook. Authorities in that state surfed Facebook and charged these University students with under age drinking. The students had no choice but to plead guilty to this invasion of online privacy. Authorities simply sat at their desk surfing Facebook as most people do charging people for petty misdemeanors, rather than being out on the streets stopping real crime. I think the new privacy features that just rolled out on Facebook to control which degrees of separation can view your postings will make Facebook just that much better.
comment by Alistair
The awkward PR nightmare is that by definition, because this is about openness, people can see what Zuckerberg considers “appropriately open.” If he doesn’t share his own friends, he can’t very well expect others to do so. That’s a nasty dilemma to be on the horns of.
The privacy pendulum will swing pretty dramatically back to personal control of information, and it’ll prove a disruptor for many tech companies that assume their users are willing to share.
comment by JS
Thanks for the comment. The word “friend” has been misused by social networks from the beginning. Most of us have less than 20 real friends, but hundreds of “friends” on social networks. Multiple.com , another social network, has implemented the concept of different access levels within their social network where a user can have his family network, best friend network, etc. with each level having different access to content and personal information. That being said, if the police thinks that theremay be evidence of a crime in your profile, they’ll get access to it and Facebook won’t get in their way.
comment by SocialMarketing Guru
I believe it’s premature to predict the demise of facebook based on their new privacy options. The default settings may be more open, but it is easy to set options for complete privacy, and it serves as a reminder to those who have not bothered to tune their settings.
Every time Facebook has made changes, such as last year with the new homepage look, people predict a negative impact. Facebook has proved them wrong each time.