Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative
wired.com
wired.com
> I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss. Cannot.
> I’d like to support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing. Cannot.
Great examples of what Facebook cannot do, and what the Facebook replacement must do.
Summing it up: would we even be having this conversation if Facebook, from day 1, started with defaulting all data as public, being clear about it, and making data securing hard to accomplish?
B. Change your privacy settings, Make it so you can only be found by searching certain things (eg: email address), Block your boss
C. Unfortunately not (yet?)
A few people who can't be bothered to back up their own work and data, nor to respond to announcements of upcoming changes, may be pissed when items are "lost". But no one's privacy is compromised. Further, if you provide clear means of such a back up and/or instructions and advisement to maintain private copies, you can help lessen this second problem.
That's something to Google's credit, that they've officially supported and developed means for users to retrieve their data locally into documented, usable formats.
B. Much of your personal data is still publicly available through Facebook Graph, regardless of how much you try to lock down your profile. It's only a matter of time before people start scraping this information and publishing it in a way that it's clearly accessible from Google, and Facebook won't be able to do anything about it.
I don't think this is true, as an example here is what the graph API shows about my account:
{
"id": "800679",
"name": "Matthew Brown",
"first_name": "Matthew",
"last_name": "Brown",
"location": {
"id": null,
"name": null
},
"gender": "male"
}
2) Before the Graph, it was possible to hide all of this information completely if you used the strictest privacy settings. You could completely hide the fact that you had a facebook account; even the things you published on public FB pages would just show your first name and a placeholder photo.
3) Before the Graph, it wasn't possible to systematically scrape the info of all Facebook users sequentially. The fact that this is now possible will make it easy to collate the data and publish information about you that you haven't personally shared. Most users' photo albums are set to "everyone" (by accident, of course), but previously they were pretty much undiscoverable even if they were public. I'm pretty certain that this is going to be exploted by sploggers and others, just like every other large publicly accessible source of data.
For example, if your friend list privacy is set to "Everyone", accessing your facebook page while logged out will show a random sample of your friends. Switch the privacy setting to "only friends" or something restrictive, return to the profile page in a logged out state, and note that your friends no longer are displayed.
EDIT: To clarify, I'm not talking about the publicly exposed "graph". I'm talking about what they've long provided to their third party affiliates, e.g. all the approved Facebook "application" developers/hosts.
P.S. Notice the nice information asymmetry involved in this, as well. You, as a private individual, have no access to this. But designated (and / as in paying) parties do, at the sole selection (I think I'll avoid use of the word "discretion") of Facebook.
Ironically, right before the big push to erode users' privacy, it seemed that they might have taken it a step further and replaced your name with "facebook user", removing even your first name (I was never sure if this was intentional or a bug, but in any case it didn't last long as the big privacy changes came soon after).
We know how valuable the data is and what can be done with it, that makes us much more sensitive to giving it up.
Venn diagrams for your social graph. Or trees. Preferably both. If Yelp/Microsoft/whoever wants my data, they become a member of my social graph, not some all-seeing entity that hovers above me recording every comment I make. Data that goes to them is encrypted as well of course.
Make it distributed, because no company hosting user data will be able to resist the temptation to use it to make money. Or build it on top of Dropbox, and have Dropbox serve as the backup for your online social life, encrypted, of course. 2GB will eventually fill up, and hopefully people will be happy to pay for extra storage, especially if you make it easy.
It would work for techies like us, but it wouldn't work for the segment that is making Facebook so transcendently popular. MySpace was a "teen" thing, others before it, too, but Facebook is mainstream; my grandma has a profile, my parents have profiles, and such is true of many.
Also mainstream is turning off your computer when you're not using it. Almost every non-techie I know is really interested in having their computer turned off. They don't really care about waiting for it to come back up. Telling them that their profile is only accessible while their computer is on is an instant killer. And what if their internet goes out? They're down for that time too. For people with spotty or wireless connections, saying "your profile will only work when your connection works, like 30% of the time", is not going to be too encouraging.
What if a user's hard drive dies? Do you really expect people like my 86-year-old grandmother to make backups of her social network profile frequently enough for it to be meaningful? Or what if a user just gets a new computer? Are they going to understand how to transfer the profile?
Making users download and run a P2P server 24/7 slows down the computer, increases personal connection bandwidth usage commensurate with one's popularity, and creates a big opening for scammers.
I know Facebook would be much less enjoyable if I had to sit around and wait for the dial-up AOL connections of the old people I know to upload their photos. Or even home broadband connections; in the US, those are usually capped at 60-70kbps upload, which is pretty slow.
How easy would it be to create a page that looks like your network's page and say "We've updated our client! This is a special update that we can't auto-update for these smart-sounding technical reasons, so please download and install it." People would do this immediately because social networks are a major part of their web usage; for some, the only reason they use computer. And your network would be poisoned and the users' profile disabled just that easily.
I just don't see how a P2P social network would gain mainstream appeal. What are your solutions to these problems?
The point shouldn't be to cut out Facebook, it should be to keep the user in complete control of their data. You can transfer control to an arbitrary entity but what are they going to do to make money, and are they going to become corrupt or not? And if you asked yourself the same thing about Zuckerberg the day after Thefacebook went online, what would your answer be?
Same as Linux and Firefox. By the time the community effort got it together, most of the effort was obsolete. Google's Chrome OS throws much of linux away. NativeClient sandboxing turns browsers and plugins into frameworks of choice, like jQuery.
There has to be a more efficient way.
Care to explain, how all the effort in Linux was obsolute ? (And i am on Ubuntu Linux typing this reply)
As far as new technologies, I imagine internet protocols and bandwidth in 2018 will make it possible to share massive databases of information. New parallel chips will enable anyone to analyze massive databases of information, a whole economy of data sharing could emerge. New possibilities in online education, government, healthcare will all depend on the availability of currently private data.
By 2030 we will be living in "The Matrix" where AIs will learn from us by monitoring every single thought we have.
It's an important perspective. Facebook is just a tiny step, just like Windows was. They don't need to be perfect. Most importantly they should not be imitated or duplicated with a "free and uber-private" label. They need to be rethought with the long term perspective in mind.
What's the point of privacy? Do people care about distant data miners going through their lives or do they just want to avoid being fired or ridiculed by those close to them? And if some data miners gain magic knowledge on how to manipulate the masses, don't get paranoid. It's likely government will be redesigned around the new technology by then.
If anybody wants to take this in some direction, I am more than happy to come aboard.
Human progress is largely evolutionary and incremental. We stand on all that came before us. Facebook brought a new concept of interaction that has a downside many people are against. They address this by creating an alternative, and so goes history.
Progress is a dialog.
reminds me of OS X and BSD, Webkit and KHTML.
Before Facebook there was FOAF, which was exactly the same except for that it was open and distributed... And nobody used it. Being closed is the only thing that makes Facebook good.
Yeah, because no one is going to give 700 million dollars to a bunch of hippies to make some internet commune.
Now that they appear to have given up that angle and replaced it with an unpredictable tangle of spurious logic that, yes, spews stuff haphazardly all over the open web, why not just publish your updates in the open?
What needs to happen now is that someone needs to go into Facebook's old business, the one they have apparently abandoned. Where is the closed service that makes a best-effort attempt to provide an invite-only social space for myself and my friends?
- Photos here and there
- Random links/videos scooped around the net
- Rants/statuses nobody cares about
- Passive activism where people "join a group"/like something and do nothing about it
- Farmville
It is boring, really. I found twitter, recently, of immense use in two fields. First, around the industry bunch of professionals connected themselves even without knowing each other beforehand and openly discussing stuff and sharing ideas. (notably game dev). Also, have you seen stocktwits? If they can find a system to filter out the noise... excellent! I have an idea though, if they could somehow pool calls from regular users and "analysts" and compare them to a weighted random generator and post stats next to each user that would be great.
All lifestreaming did was aggregate all of this into a discoverable point with privacy controls.
What happened?
"Now, say you you write a public update, saying, “My boss had a crazy great idea for a new product!” Now, you might not know it, but there is a Facebook page for “My Crazy Boss” and because your post had all the right words, your post now shows up on that page. Include the words “FBI” or “CIA,” and you show up on the FBI or CIA page."
That is scary.
If you don't want your status messages to be visible to everyone, set your privacy settings accordingly. Account -> Privacy Settings -> Personal Information and Posts and adjust the "Posts by Me" setting to whatever you like.
I plan to do it in a Python web framework, most likely Django.
I know people have been discussing a distributed social network, but I don't see a market for that among the non-techies of the world. Just like they see XMPP as gMail chat (most of them), open standards mean nothing. Just look at openID, it simply can't gain much traction -- unless a flag carrier picks it up. Distributed social networking will simply splinter the arena till it's impossible for them to know "which one?"
For a new social network, the users want: 1) Simplicity. 2) Privacy. 3) Interaction. 4) Rich but intuitive interfaces.
I am making a call for any interested devs, shoot me an email. lukeseelenbinder <at> the only webmail provider to use. :)
(If I should post this as a new post. Let me know. I'm a little new to HN)
The fact is for something like Facebook to function smoothly, it has to be centralized. There has to be a server somewhere out there that can be queried reliably for this data and that's the bottom line, even if you have something API-based like OpenSocial. It's just a matter of who you're going to trust with that data -- and as we see over and over again, money and power clouds judgment; a good candidate to control this network when it's starting out may not hold up so well under the barrages of billions in revenue and investors down the neck.
The only way for users to have real control over their data is to build some P2P/self-hosting architecture, and for reasons all HN readers understand, this would be a huge, huge mess.
I hate to do this to you, but [citation needed].
for reasons all HN readers understand, [P2P] would be a huge, huge mess.
Count me as one HN reader who does not understand that. (But then, it's hard to get someone to understand something if his ideology depends on not understanding it...)
My guess is that there will be half a dozen competing protocols within a year.
And, again, even then, if we follow the OpenID model of external providers, it's all about trusting that external provider with your data. There's still a central point with your data on it. There has to be. Unless the user is self-hosting this data, there is always a reliance on external entities. And how long could an external provider survive merely as a host for applications like Facebook, while not pulling in any revenue from Facebook's revenue channels like ads or Credits?
That is an interesting thought. Eben Moglin, "Freedom vs. The Cloud Log" ~ http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Interview-Eben-Moglen-... has a solution. A small web server where you control the logs and content, "do-able".
Is this really true, or is the author conflating updates with the newly-normalized interests fields?
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Legos/110234219005966?ref=t...
Take a look at the "Related Global Posts" list below. You'll see lots of stuff from people who don't list lego in their interests fields.
The question I have is whether posts still show up if your status updates are hidden to people who are not friends or friends of friends.
Personally, I like keeping my online social identity sandboxed away in my browser, in a tab. If it's integrated into my browser's code, then it's harder to understand how my privacy works.
In the current situation, I just have to clear my cookies to ensure my privacy is secure.
I'm _not_ enthusiastic about a future where my browser has the functionality of specific web services built into it.
How long till CPO Chris Kelly's job is obsolesced by the utter lack of privacy on FB?
Not because I have a vested interest in them, but I don't have any info I need to keep private (I make sure of this) and I am not one to buy into hype and running around with your hands in the air.
Go ahead, downvote me for not being a Facebook alarmist. I do apologize though if I put it too curtly.
Formally known as XFN?
besides, XHTML never caught on. otoh, HTML5 is doing great.
The Tipping Point is a good book to learn why not. In-browser social networks is a not a cool thing anymore. It is just some feature of the net.
What is really interesting - is an emerging market of the Android-powered devices. The hardware is powerful and cheap enough, and the platform is open and simple (unlike the Nokia's crap).
The next generation of the social communications should be something like "texting 2.0" - texting with easy integration of a rich content from phone's camera on the fly. Just because teens loves texting, taking photos and their mobile phones.
One good thing that might come out of this is some "rules of the road" on changing ToS when they also change the social contract under which people entered their personal data.
It is only the deviant evil bastards such as myself who steer clear of the site: the atheist in a sea of believers, the swinger in an ocean of conventional marrieds, the Libertarian government critic in a swirl of FBI and CIA FB meddling, the gay-rights supporter in a community of homophobes... Damn, and this is just the beginning.
Free isn't necessarily freedom which is why I tend to be doubly-cautious around it.
When the revolution comes, the spark that lights the fire won't come from Hacker News.
/me goes off to find a greasemonkey script to drop FB articles.