Lessons from Facebook’s experiments

[Update] Adding links and references as they bubble up on this topic…

There has been a range of news recently about Facebook’s latest approach to users’ privacy.

Wired has an article – Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative – explaining the concern being raised by many. By default, Facebook is now connecting and publishing every piece of data you choose to share on the platform. You may think you are only sharing your photos with your friends and family, but you are granting permission for Facebook to share your content with everyone and anyone on the Internet.

Robert Scoble has an article – Much ado about privacy on Facebook – with the counter argument. That we’re kidding ourselves if we ever thought anything we share on a computer, especially one connected to a network, is private. Facebook is just exploiting that which others have exploited less visibly (or easily – and that’s the key difference) in the past, and in the process helping people find what they need in ways Google never can.

Robert has a point. However the picture is a little more complicated. Not everyone wants to share their entire life online with everyone else and every organisation on the planet. Some people have very good and legitimate reasons not to. You could argue that such people simply shouldn’t be on Facebook. But in the past, it wasn’t a problem – the default behaviour in Facebook’s privacy policy was that information would only be shared amongst your network, which could be as large or small as you choose it to be. And your content stayed within the walls of Facebook unless you chose to opt-in to third party applications. That has now all changed and Facebook does not make deleting anything easy. Even if you choose to leave, if your ‘friends’ have already shared your content or tagged their own content with your name then your identity will continue to persist without you. And if you choose to stay, for certain content it is now all or nothing – if you try to opt-out of sharing with everyone then it will be removed from your profile and friends will no longer see it either.

Facebook is transitioning from a site for building social networks between friends to being one giant social network. A new mesh of connected personalised data is being created that has never before been possible. And that mesh is being shared with whatever organisations Facebook chooses to do business with. At the same time as we are seeing new tools arise that can mine massive amounts of data for patterns and profiling… We don’t yet know what all the implications – good and bad – will be. And whilst Robert highlights the good, history tells us there will also be bad. This is a live experiment that over 400 million people (and that’s just the active users) unknowingly volunteered to participate in.

Related Blog Posts

• Do search and social networks mix? – March 2010

References

• Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative – Wired
• Much ado about privacy on Facebook – Robert Scoble
• Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline – Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Facebook’s “Evil Interfaces” – Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Top 10 reasons you should quit Facebook – rocket.ly
• Facebook Statistics – Facebook Pressroom (as published on 9th May 2010)
• Infographic: Facebook privacy options – New York Times

Other posts of interest on this topic:

• The Facebook Alienation: Pleasing the Wrong Stakeholders – Strategyist, May 2010
• Why I am using Google Buzz as an alternative to Facebook – Louis Gray, May 2010
• Publicly searching Facebook status updates – TechCrunch, May 2010
• Facebook as a utility, utilities get regulated – Danah Boyd, May 2010
• Goodbye Facebook – Neville Hobson, May 2010