Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative | Epicenter | Wired.com
Is there a substantive alternative to Facebook on the horizon? Google? Anyone? Hullo?
So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.
This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.
This Week in Google – ep 41 offered a terrific discussion on the nature of trust. I’ve made fun of Jeff Jarvis in the past, mostly because of the paranoid hand-wringing that always seems to emanate from his general direction, but the world needs more people who think deeply about these issues — guys just like Jeff. In this case, his point is that while Google started out as a company vested in publishing your public information to the world at large, then transformed into a company offering more services targeted at maintaining your private life and connections, Facebook started out as a company dedicated to helping you connect with a private network, and has, over the years, moved the other direction. The result is a certain cognitive dissonance that people-who-think-deeply-about-such-things can’t quite assimilate.
Those of us who choose to live our lives in public are stuck between a rock and a hard place. I, for one, would love to find an alternative to Facebook with simpler controls. The sometimes unfortunate nature of networks is this: you have to go where the people are if you want to do more than shout at an empty room.
A few months ago, I wrote a post about how to get more out of Facebook. My intent, at the time, was to write a series on configuring the application to protect your privacy, reduce Facebook apps annoyance, and allow you to connect with the people that are important in your life. I got one post into the series and got swept away by events. When I finally got back to it this week, I started digging into the terms and options after the last round of Facebook updates and have come to a frustrating realization: I think the original intent of my series is now impossible to deliver.
First, take a look at this visualization by Matt McKeon demonstrating the change in Facebook default privacy settings over time. If you have some time, peruse the comments, which have a few interesting points:
One thing which is almost as interesting is how much the effectiveness of the “most restrictive” non-default has also gone down in a similar pattern. Not only have the (enormously powerful) defaults become super-permissive, but facebook has reduced the ability of concerned parties, or really the small subset willing to keep constantly twiddling their privacy settings, to keep their private data private.
and…
There is this bizarre meme running through the press that, somehow, Facebook has a MONOPOLY on publishing personal information, and that we are all pawns in some sort of vicious commercial game, but that somehow we can’t STOP being on Facebook.
On the first point: given the convoluted nature of the latest privacy options panel, I’d be interested in data on the size of that subset since April 1, 2010.
On the second point: What Facebook has isn’t a monopoly. Monopolistic practices don’t enter in to this discussion. What’s disturbing is that Facebook has collected a massive amount of data on each of us, and has a documented history of changing the way they present that data — and to whom they present it — with each evolution of policy. The implication is that data I gave to Facebook under terms I once agreed to, is now offered publicly under terms I no longer agree to (or potentially understand), with limited clear method for user intervention.
If you’re more of a reader, check out this piece on BusinessInsider. In it, there’s a great review of salient language from the Facebook Privacy Policy as it was at each update from 2005 to present. The most interesting line is this from the update in April, 2010:
If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.
I’d sure be interested in someone more lawyerly than I am to translate that bit, cause here’s how I read it: If you don’t like it, don’t use it.
Come to think of it, pretty damned good advice, that.