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rfmcdonaldSome of you may know that today is Quit Facebook Day. Started up by Torontonians Joseph Dee and Matthew Milan, this day is a way for Facebook users to register their upset with Facebook's--shall we say lack of concern for private data. Last I heard, they rounded up twenty-six thousand supporters, at least one of him is a LJ friend of mine. Against Facebook's remaining half-billion users, I can't help but think this is wasted if noble gesture.
At her blog apophenia, very interesting social media writer danah boyd was quite upset with the ways in which Facebook violated individual privacy, not only in terms of data collection but in making private data accessible to others, like friends of their friends.
I've a suggestion. By this point, Facebook has become a critical service for very high proportions of the general population, in Canada and other technology-heavy countries. I know that my social life would be much more difficult to plan without Facebook's groups and portable messaging systems. I would go so far as to say that social networking systems--Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera--are becoming almost as important as telephone systems. Why not regulate them the same way? Some measure of global coordination would be necessary--Canada's privacy commissioner has clout, but Canada's only a small share of Facebook's market--but I think, hope, it could be done.
(Then again, telephone companies have fairly large and secure revenues. Is Facebook making a profit? Regulating marginal businesses tightly might not be such a good idea.)
At her blog apophenia, very interesting social media writer danah boyd was quite upset with the ways in which Facebook violated individual privacy, not only in terms of data collection but in making private data accessible to others, like friends of their friends.
If Facebook wanted radical transparency, they could communicate to users every single person and entity who can see their content. They could notify then when the content is accessed by a partner. They could show them who all is included in “friends-of-friends” (or at least a number of people). They hide behind lists because people’s abstractions allow them to share more. When people think “friends-of-friends” they don’t think about all of the types of people that their friends might link to; they think of the people that their friends would bring to a dinner party if they were to host it. When they think of everyone, they think of individual people who might have an interest in them, not 3rd party services who want to monetize or redistribute their data. Users have no sense of how their data is being used and Facebook is not radically transparent about what that data is used for. Quite the opposite. Convolution works. It keeps the press out.
The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely unfair. It gives users the illusion of choice and hides the details away from them “for their own good.”
I've a suggestion. By this point, Facebook has become a critical service for very high proportions of the general population, in Canada and other technology-heavy countries. I know that my social life would be much more difficult to plan without Facebook's groups and portable messaging systems. I would go so far as to say that social networking systems--Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera--are becoming almost as important as telephone systems. Why not regulate them the same way? Some measure of global coordination would be necessary--Canada's privacy commissioner has clout, but Canada's only a small share of Facebook's market--but I think, hope, it could be done.
(Then again, telephone companies have fairly large and secure revenues. Is Facebook making a profit? Regulating marginal businesses tightly might not be such a good idea.)
