Facebook And Privacy
With everyone piling onto Facebook about privacy concerns, Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge dig into the issue to see if there is realy a problem or whether it is just a bunch of tin-foil hat wearers getting their knickers in a twist.
Of course, we are the very start of the conversation! What do you think? Do yo think there are reasonable privacy concerns with Facebook? Have you experience what you consider to be a breach of privacy? What can Facebook do to help quell these concerns?
19 Comments to “Facebook And Privacy”
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To me the biggest problem is a lack of openness leading to a lack of choice.
Sure, there are a hundred different social networking sites you can choose from but the very nature of social networking means that if you actually want to socialise with people you have to use the network that everyone else is using (i.e. Facebook). This means that on a practical level you don’t have any choice in your social networking provider so Facebook can get away with pushing the boundaries of your privacy because it’s very unlikely that you’ll leave unless there’s a mass migration and everyone you know also leaves.
What would be better would be if you could choose any social network (based on the features they provide or the privacy policy they have) and still connect to people on other social networks. This is the aim of the OStatus project (http://ostatus.org/) which aims to use a collection of existing open standards to allow federation between social networks. Distributed social networking is something a lot of projects are working towards at the moment including StatusNet and the recently popular Diaspora (even Mark Zuckerberg seems to think Diaspora is a neat idea).
It’s interesting to note that this month there will be an invite-only “Federated Social Web Summit” in Portland (http://federatedsocialweb.net/wiki/Main_Page). This event is being run by the open standards crowd but representatives of Facebook, Twitter and Google will all be attending!
If OStatus becomes to social networking what IMAP is to email then we’ll have much more choice in our social networking provider and privacy standards will benefit as a result.
I recently wrote a blog post about OStatus and distributed social networking here http://www.tola.me.uk/blog/2010/06/09/ostatus if you’re interested.
I meant SMTP, not IMAP
I completely agree. Sick and tired of signing up everywhere.
Also what I’d like is to see is some sort of integration that can let you aggregates everything out there into a feed. Something like twitter where you can see anything someone posted on any site. I mean if I find a cool clip why would I have to go to facebook to write about it ? Why can’t I just comment on it then and there and have all my friends see it ?
Strategy wise, it seems unlikely that FB will give up their strong network effect. Notice that even when they started using Jabber for chat, it wasn’t federated.
Yes I think you’re right, Facebook probably thinks it’s in their interests to hold out on federation as long as possible so as not to dilute their user base.
Hopefully the open approach will finally win out like it did with email (SMTP) and blogging (RSS), but that could take a very long time.
I think it will win simply because it’s needed for integration with other sites. Everything has a “social” component these days. The best bet for FB would be to become a sort of platform for that component. I mean I don’t think there’s a future for dedicated social network sites. I see the social component as the underling connection that ties the web together and you can’t have that if you’re isolated.
Facebook as a platform is a very interesting idea, especially when you take the long-term view, as @mg suggests in the post following this. What if Facebook ends up like email?
Not only is it interesting to consider what the web would look like, but also how it affects society – it’s pretty much a given that (at least in the Western world) you have an internet connection and an email address, and you’re pretty much given a funny look if you don’t. Will non-Facebook users become excluded? Hmm.
I think you’re referring exactly the opposite of what I’m thinking. I’m saying there won’t be any more facebook.com. Or at least users wont go there as much. I’m thinking about social networking as the underlying platform that the web sort of runs on. It will be integrated in any website and each of us will have his or her favorite way of interacting with it. But yes you’ll pretty much have to have an account because that will probably be like your on-line identity but I you probably won’t think about it as the FB account… but more as your internet account.
And if you want to find out how society will be changed by this just talk to a few teenagers. I’m pretty sure they already know.
Relying on company “privacy policies” is futile. If they break them, then there is nothing meaningful you can do about it because that information is already out there. If there is something you don’t want people to know, then don’t start telling third parties like Facebook. You don’t know what it is going to turn into 10 years from now.
In the 1990s I was on an engineering related mailing list that circulated among a relatively small group of people. It was fairly common to include contact information in your signature so that people could contact you directly. That mailing list eventually grew into a large web site, and the old e-mail archives were published where Google and various Nigerian business gentlemen can now find them. Now that information that was accessible to just a small group of professionals is now accessible by everyone. No one had imagined this however 15 years ago. If the list members knew then what they know now, they probably would have been more careful about what they said about themselves.
The big question about Facebook isn’t so much what is it like now. The big question is what will it be like 10 or 15 years from now.
It’s true that you’re trusting a third party with your data, but if you want the benefits of social networking services then what is the alternative?
You could take distributed social networking to the extreme and host your own data, but I’m not sure how practical that would be for most people. At least with the current tools available…
It will be interesting when the current Facebook generation (myself included) grow up with their youth documented in excruciating detail on the Internet!
I get were you guys were going and agree for the most part. I was a bit annoyed by the simple re-hashing, I felt you left out any discussion of the real issue behind the Facebook fuss, copyrights.
Yes that’s right, never mind those trollish distracting websites you chose to discuss, to my understanding a good deal of the issue was the idea that users might lose their copyright as the originators of their own words. I think it is a rather ironic compliant, but as far as I understand copyrights are not exclusive for corporate entities.
The constantly morphing terms at Facebook are highly frustrating and I was disappointed you didn’t touch base in more depth on that issue either, since I saw this along with the substance of the most recent change the cause of the kerfluffle. Does or should Facebook have rights to the users data? That’s the real issue.
Facebook is a public square, and in any other public square you own the words you decide to scream out at the top of your lungs, what makes Facebook any different? Now that would be a fresh discussion.
Facebook doesn’t just have your birth date, as you implied. They have your photos, your opinions, your contacts, your activities, your location, your name, your religion, your political affiliations, your likes, your dislikes, your gender, your sexual orientation, your relationships, your employment, your address, your phone number, your email address, access to all your emails (if you use the “find people you email” feature), your friends, your private messages, the ads you like, your videos and your notes. Is it too much to ask that most of that information is only shared with my friends, and not with the whole world?
All of which you’ve chosen to put there, and you can choose to protect it. Of course, would it be better not to display it by default? Yes. But until they remove the option to protect your data, this is overblown.
Also, some of the things you mentioned are a bit off, messages are private of course, and some of the things actually are displayed to friends only by default.
I think I agree with Jono and Aq that you need to take responsibility for your own privacy online and make sure you review your privacy settings in Facebook frequently. It’s really not that hard, after all. And also don’t post anything that you don’t want read any further. Mind you, that can bite you in the arse too:
A recent news story in Australia was about the investigation of two high-school teachers after photos of them dressed up as students and suggestively dancing at a party were published in a newspaper. These pictures came from Facebook, and it turned out that the reporters who wrote the articles were ‘friends’ of these teachers and that’s how they got the pictures. The teachers were cleared and presumably they ‘unfriended’ the reporters. The pictures weren’t “public” at all but I guess it means you should still be wary about posting stuff because once the pics are out a lot of damage is done – just ask how many newspaper readers heard about the initial story and were disgusted by the teachers who then also heard they’d been cleared. Mud sticks.
I think @Goblin makes a very good point about copyright too – I’m not sure but AFAIK Facebook appropriates copyright to anything you post on it, including pics. For most people that’s not an issue, but if you’re a budding photographer or artist posting them could come back and bite you later when you’re selling your work for squillions.
I also think the Facebook privacy thing is becoming better know out of the geek community, at least in Australia. Australia’s Communications Minister, Senator (cough technically illiterate cough) Steven Conroy, has had a go at Facebook and Google over how they treat people’s data, to the extent of calling it “creepy” (thoughts of pots and kettles appear in my mind). Anyhow, Google was found to be scraping public wifi while on their StreetView rounds and they’re having to deal with all sorts of investigations in Australia and the US (don’t know about elsewhere) about what was collected (maybe MAC addresses? certainly low-level info) and about destroying what they’re not allowed to have. My point is that this federal government minister is getting press (there’s a little opposition to a number of policies he’s pushing) and what he talks about is becoming known in the wider community.
Anyway, having rambled this long I may as well as one more thing. I agree that people should manage their own privacy on the web and it makes sense that companies like Facebook should rightly want to use your information to better target ads to you and others in your demographic. I guess what concerns me a little is that some of the ramifications of this relatively new approach to personal information will have in the future. What will sentiment mining (see my post on the other online information shot) really bring us in the long term. What happens when the US presidential candidate in 2040 has to account for swearing on their Facebook status when they were 15? Or, perhaps more relevantly, when someone who’s 15 now wants to get a job with company A in 10 years and their Twitter posts suggest they think company A’s products are crap. The web is forever, as far as we can tell, and it won’t be for a few years yet that a lot of this stuff will start to become apparent, though it’s starting.
Hmmmmm.
I for one deleted my Facebook account a few months ago. It was partly because I don’t trust the company all that much and partly because I’m not that big on social networking. Plus it’s a huge fucking time sink and I’d rather keep in touch with people the old fashion way which is just talk to them… face to face, on the phone or even e-mail. I know it takes some effort but it somehow feels better.
Now the privacy part is not about my birthday or crap like that. People that think that’s an issue are just brainless mouthpieces that just jumped on the bandwagon. Privacy is about control. And yes you have control over what is public or private and things like that but there is no control or transparency on what the company does with the data. And I’m not saying they’re going to necessarily use it in bad ways. The point is there’s a limit to the amount of trust I’m willing to give to companies in general. It’s not a tinfoil hat kind of thing.. it’s just being realistic. Companies are not people and if they were you wouldn’t really want to be friends with them. There’s a nice documentary that I think best explains it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa3wyaEe9vE * take it with a pinch of salt.. this isn’t about conspiracy theories.
Also there’s this huge misuse/misunderstanding of private versus public that people that don’t have private information on their facebook account probably can’t see. If I post anything as private I don’t necessarily think about each of my hundreds of so called friends that will see it. In other words there’s a false sense of security related to so called “private” information.
Now in the case of Facebook I think they’re the main target in this because they’re too good. They’re just too good at basically finding out who you are. And that’s something that can really get to people sometimes. I mean the fact that Amazon knows what books I like doesn’t concern anybody because it’s not a big deal. But the fact that Facebook knows all my friends and my family can be scary sometimes. So it’s allot easier to make a villain out of of them than of anybody else.
Oh and by the way targeted advertising is still advertising. Cut the crap with the helpful friend thing. I don’t like advertising targeted or otherwise.
In the end I think the best thing for Facebook would be to completely remove the private option. Basically everything that you put in there is public to everyone so if you want something to stay private don’t post it. And also I’d like a law to force any company that offers “private” services to encrypt all your data so that not even the company can read it. I’m thinking here about email for example because there’s allot more personal information about you in there than anywhere else. It’s been like that for 15 years and nobody is complaining about it.
Also if you think people are not screwed over because of privacy issues you should have a look on 4chan
… if you can bare the pornography that is. There’s plenty of cases in there where information from social sites was used to track down people. Now the only reason this happens is usually because those people have something to hide. In most cases that’s nude pics posted on 4chan itself. But still finding out where people live and their phone number just from a picture posted on an anonymous site is a pretty huge leap. The fact that you can find that information isn’t a problem by itself but but the way you use it can be. In the case of 4chan is usually calling up the parents to ask them what they think about they’re child putting nude pics on the web 
.
this just in: http://www.darkreading.com/insiderthreat/security/privacy/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225702468
It’s a really nice article about what can be done by gaming the social networking sites
Also the guys in this video make some interesting arguments.
http://www.darkreading.com/security/app-security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=211201381
It’s older so the technical details might be outdated.
I want to see what happens with [Diaspora][http://www.joindiaspora.com] and their notion of social networking.
If it works as I understand it, I could run my own social network node that works with any others but is under my control and my terms.
I want to see a move away from Facebook, the issues regarding copyright and T&Cs bother me deeply.
Apparently the markdown code isn’t the way to do it! http://www.joindiaspora.com
There we go!