Facebook and Privacy

Project Beacon is the latest controversy surrounding good ol’ Facebook. It’s a “service” that third party stores can use that will publicize your purchases at said store into your facebook news feed, so you go to a participating online retailer buy widget X and all of a sudden all your friends and coworkers get to see that you just bought Widget X. Weird - although Amazon has had a similar feature (that I never felt the need to use) where after you make your purchase you could email several of your friends the things you just bought.

It’s fairly stupid, but innocuous enough except for one thing, it’s very difficult to opt out of. In that TechCrunch piece they show a screen shot of a preference page that lets you opt out of this feature completely (something I would dearly love to do) but if you go to your facebook privacy page now and click on “external websites” you get no such option - you can only opt out of things on a per-site basis after they have already tried to send something to facebook. According to the page participating sites have to inform you that they are sending something to facebook and give you the ability to prevent those items for going - I haven’t seen this in action yet, so I don’t know how it works. Presumably, once they’ve tried to send something you can then go back to the privacy settings and opt out of that site forever. It’s pretty ridiculous that they don’t offer you a global opt out, though.

As always, though, there’s all sorts of blogger anger at this - although I suspect much more anger than there actually is in Facebook’s userbase. So much so that MoveOn.org, a website about political action has created a whole section that dominates their homepage against facebook beacons. Craziness.

However, interestingly, in the to and fro of the intermatrix there’s a blogger backlash against the backlash. I read this Dave Winer piece which I was fully prepared to be super annoyed by but found myself more or less in agreement with. The MoveOn petition is naive, they’ve stepped into a world that they may not have much experience with. Not that it isn’t something worth complaining about - but in the spectrum of complaints, even complaints to levy against facebook, I think it isn’t that major or rather is a minor symptom of a more fundamental problem. I think, as Dave says, if you’re going to rally the troops around something some deeper thought should have gone into the rallying point and something more significant should have been chosen.

That is, picking what will come down to a radio button (that already existed) on a preference page isn’t necessarily the best outcome one could hope for in this battle. Defining the battle itself would have been a good first step. The obvious battle is one of privacy - there’s a lot of information going into facebook and it seems they’re being awfully free with it. Their new advertising platform, as an example, gives up all kinds of info going so far as to prompt an nytimes bit questioning it’s legality. Or realize that facebook is now allowing facebook app developers to spam your email box - you can opt out, but you are opted in by default and any app you already are using has you automatically opted in.

It seems that there’s no shortage of privacy issues here - basically all revolving around opting in and out of these features. A broader campaign for privacy in facebook would have been a better use of MoveOn’s political muscle. On the other hand Dave takes this in a completely different direction - instead of fighting for privacy he simply wants more control or access to his data. That is, all the data he provides to Netflix and Yahoo should be availble to him in a convenient format that he can then choose to provide to facebook (or whoever).

Personally, I think it is a naive desire (especially at this point and for the foreseeable future) to believe that even should sites start providing your data that it would then simply be useable by every other site. Things are very specific, something as simple as ratings are handled very differently by different sites. But the point is a good one that all these sites, like facebook, are one way avenues you funnel the information in but then have little control about what happens with that information. Part of getting control is the abililty to get your information out of it (it is after all, or should be, your information) and the other part is controlling what the party you’ve given your information too can do with that information. People are getting used to the loss of the ephemerality of conversation (whether they ought to have to get used to it is another question entirely) so it is interesting to see the shift of conversation change from the existence and maintenance of this information to simply the control of it.

Anyhow, I wish MoveOn luck with the petition, I’d sure love to be able to globally opt out of this program. I think, though, that most people don’t care and as people grow up online they are simply used to the notion of all the myriad details of their lives being published there. In a world where email’s on the decline and facebook messages are all the rage, I think maybe it’s mostly us old fogies who simply can’t adjust to the new new. Ok, maybe that bank intern needed a little adjustment, too, but you know what I mean.

Nov 26th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: politics · privacy · social networks