Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information
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The reason I am not on facebook is quite simple, I do not want to give facebook my private information, because I do not trust Facebook. I do not trust Mark Z. I do not believe that they have individual users' best interests at heart.
What I do believe is that they are interested in getting more users, sharing more information, and making more money. None of these are in my best interest. In fact, as Facebook gets more users, the quality of facebook will continue to decline, as will their treatment of those users.
It takes a lot of money to operate 10,000 servers (or however many they have at this point). It takes a lot of ad revenue. It takes a lot of people and investors. All of that means continued focus on the bottom line to ensure survival.
Facebook's only value is in the information people put into it and they will do what they need to do with that information to keep powering those tens of thousands of servers.
In case you have profiles up on the internet (not just FB) share only what you are comfortable to loose. Once in different hands it is not yours anymore.
I don't see why sharing more information will make more money in the long term. Keeping the users happy and engaged would seem more profitable to me. What is the logic?
"In fact, as Facebook gets more users, the quality of facebook will continue to decline, as will their treatment of those users."
I don't understand why treating the users badly would increase the value of the company.
Facebook has only one product, information. When companies want to grow, they have to produce more product. Facebook can produce more product in only three ways: getting more users, getting users to add more info, or sharing more of the info they've already added. There is no other way.
When new user accounts plateau, when users are content with the amount of info they've added or the additional value of that data declines due to signal-to-noise, the only method they have left is to share more of the information they already have in the form of greater public visibility.
Remember, Facebook's customers are not the users, they are the advertisers. If you want to establish a relationship with a company designed to make profit, profit should be the foundation of the relationship. Facebook's users do not profit. They provide labor to improve the value of facebook with no compensation in return, so the relationship is unbalanced. Even factory workers are paid, albeit not much comparatively, but someone else somewhere is making less and will migrate to the factory to fill jobs people quit.
In facebook's case, turnover can't be filled. The people won't come back and there is a diminishing quantity of new users to pick from. Eventually, users will stop joining because the knowledge we are sharing here will reach them before they do and they'll have lost their naive innocence -- a requirement of any sharecropper.
Why more sharing of information will make more money is because money is made through the information. Basically, advertisers can better target ads. By treating users badly, I mean in an increasingly selfish manner by doing things their users don't appreciate. Users don't want someone unilaterally deciding how much of their, what they consider, private information is shown to third parties -- millions of other parties -- like the FBI, Police, IRS, potential employers.
I think this is demonstrably false. It's true, my brother doesn't get paid by Facebook to spend time on the site. Google doesn't pay me to use GMail either, and yet I use it every day all day. Money isn't the only way to provide value. And there's no way Facebook could have reached 400 million users without providing value to a lot of those people.
What I'm getting from this is that you should assume that all your Facebook information is publicly available, and act accordingly, because they could make it so at any time. At this rate of trustworthiness, I wouldn't be that surprised if in 2 years status updates were made retroactively public with no opt-out (and maybe without even telling you).
Edit: Is this even legal? Consider the following scenario: Someone signed up for a Facebook account 3 years ago, and entered some of this information, at a time when their privacy policy explicitly promised that the information would not be shared. They have not logged in since, so cannot be said to have even implicitly agreed to a change in the privacy policy (and Facebook has not mailed out any notice of the change). Now their information is made public, in violation of the privacy policy. Not sure how easy it'd be to enforce, but at the very least it seems sleazy.
Here's what I'd posted, in essence:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=382978412130
Users can edit which connections they want to add to their profile. They can also hide some connections on their profile, and remove others if they so choose.
Disclosure: I work for Facebook. My opinions are my own.
Indeed you should, I'd say this applies to any website.
1) Facebook says this is opt-in: Opt-in to new connections: When you next visit your profile page on Facebook, you'll see a box appear that recommends Pages based on the interests and affiliations you'd previously added to your profile. You can then either connect to all these Pages—by clicking "Link All to My Profile"—or choose specific Pages. You can opt to only connect to some of those Pages by going to "Choose Pages Individually" and checking or unchecking specific Pages. Once you make your choice, any text you'd previously had for the current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests sections of your profile will be replaced by links to these Pages. If you would still like to express yourself with free-form text, you can still use the "Bio" section of your profile. You also can also use features and applications like Notes, status updates or Photos to share more about yourself.
They reiterate this further down the page: "If you don't want to show up on those Pages, simply disconnect from them by clicking the "Unlike" link in the bottom left column of the Page. You always decide what connections to make."
2) If you choose to opt-in you can control whether your friends see the connection on your profile by using the privacy settings.
So, it is opt-in, there is a simple way to remove yourself if you change your mind, you can control the visibility on your own profile, and if you don't want to faff around with the connections, you can just list this stuff as text in some of the available text only fields.
What is the issue?
This is STILL true, and it's publicly known how to maintain privacy. You can keep all your information private to everyone who isn't a friend, and you get to control exactly who your friends are.
If you become a "Fan" of something or post on someone's comment/Wall, you're sharing some of your information with that page. No shit it's public. Why is a misunderstanding/lack of education about Facebooks policies equivalent to that site being sneaky and/or evil?
Edit: I guess the point I'm trying to make is that Facebook actually tests the UI and copy in experiments and in the lab before deploying it; so when you make a claim that it's not working, I'd like to see some supporting evidence.
What isn't opinion is that opting out results in wiping out almost everything from your profile. That's a fairly punitive action to take against someone who doesn't want to opt in to an "opt-in" feature.
And saying that "Facebook actually tests the UI" means pretty much nothing to me. Do they publish the tests and the results? How confusing can a feature be before it's scrapped? Does the importance of the business function the feature supports affect that threshold? On top of that, given FB's history of privacy screwups and subsequent rollbacks, why should I have any faith in the company at all in this area? FB has always seemed more than comfortable with the "ask forgiveness rather than permission" model.