In Defense of Facebook
mashable.com
mashable.com
Why can't we expect services like Facebook to keep our private stuff private? Facebook was always about sharing stuff with friends and not the world. I agree it's smart to keep personal things off the web but I wonder if this guy would stand by his opinion if Gmail started publishing his e-mails.
The difference between E-mail and Facebook is that email isn't designed to be social (aka it isn't designed to spread information to masses of people quickly), while Facebook is.
However, I still don't upload pictures I'm not going to be proud of, even if it's just for an email to someone. Once it's sent to someone else, I assume that it could leak to the web in any number of ways.
Perhaps that line was too harsh, but the point is that Facebook doesn't control what your friends do with the information you post on your profile. Thus, Facebook really doesn't have the ability to keep your private stuff "private," and it's dangerous to assume that they can.
The same is true with emails. But Facebook has a unique ability over email where it can prevent basic spreading, and instead chooses the most public route by default.
I side with "Facebook is for friends" because that's what any random person will tell you they use Facebook for. Friends. That's what it's advertised as, what the UI implies it is, and it's the exact opposite of what their privacy tools do.
It really is that simple.
Just like email, Facebook was initially about sharing updates, pictures, etc. with your family and friends (i.e. people you know). Now they seem to be trying to trick people into having all this information public.
This is analogous to gmail defaulting to usenet posting, unless you configure obscure and fluid privacy settings.
Facebook did not try to trick people into sharing people more people than they intended to. If you disagree, explain what's misleading about this: http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/how-to-use-facebooks-new-...
It's not about embarrassing pictures either. A mom could post pictures of her kids without having her abusive ex-husband commenting on them. I could stay in touch with friends and relatives overseas without exposing to much of my personal life to the people I work with.
The thing you seem to be missing is that this isn't just your decision, or Facebook's, but rather that of any friends or acquaintances you have who may take a photo of you at any time, under any circumstances, and tag it with your name. It's not hard to imagine circumstances under which this might become a problem for you.
If the "victim" didn't want to get raped, she should have dressed less provocatively, not gone out after dark, and not had those drinks.
It's the same argument, and it's just as wrongheaded and lame.
The argument fails in both cases for the same reason: It ignores the larger social context of behavior. It's ironic that the "you shouldn't have trusted social media" argument is sociopathic and antisocial. It fails to see the social nature of social media!
The complex matrix of interdependencies that make civilization (writ large) and social media (writ small) possible depend upon a notion of trust that depends upon both parties seeing beyond "I'll do whatever I can to you if I can get away with it." The relationship between a user of a social media site and its user has to be one of trust because the media site holds the power.
If FB really cannot hold up its end of the deal, then it really isn't the social media site that will fill that need. It's positively stupid of Zuckerberg to think he's going to get good data in the long run by betraying his users now. FB will either be replaced via market forces or destroy the social niche through its monopoly. Bluntly, people will choose another option if they can or sabotage their data if they can't.
Consider applying that logic a little differently:
1. Should the Post Office be able to open, scan and publish all mail that they process? It should be perfectly reasonable. The person that I'm sending the mail to could do the same thing, so the Post Office has every right to do that!
2. If I put a gun into the hands of a convicted murderer, and he murders someone with it, does he get scot-free just because I 'should have known better?'
When someone leaks information that was meant to be private/confidential, you are trusting that person to keep that information private/confidential. To say that someone "should have known better" than to trust anyone with any information is to say that we should all be hermits, and that society shouldn't exist. As ludicrous as that sounds, that is the basic claim that one makes when asserting that, 'no information shared between two people is 100% guaranteed to be private.'
Whether you realize it or not, your basic claim -- at its heart -- is that it's ok for Facebook to breach your trust just because it's also possible for other people to do so.
But the Internet is not the problem. Instead, the problem is this attitude:
> If someone in my circle of friends shares something with the outside world that they shouldn't have, then they are in the wrong and will have to accept whatever the punishment is
This isn't how the real world works.
Your friends have other trusted friends that aren't you. The separation isn't between "my circle of friends" and "the outside world"; there is no "outside world." Your circle of friends each has their own circles of friends, who have their own, and those circles, together, comprise the entirety of the world. There is no separation; no barrier there. It's a problem of incorrect perspective to put a dividing line around the people connected to you and no one else—because, to everyone else, that's not where the line is. It's around them, and their friends.
You'll ask your friend for advice on something, who will delegate the question to their own friend. You tell someone a secret and ten other people will find out, all in complete confidence. You'll end up doing embarrassing things in other people's wedding pictures, or being captured in a photo alongside them in a bar. This isn't something that can remain private, because these aren't facts about you. They're stories occurring in other people's worlds, in other people's circles—they just happen, tangentially, to have you as a property of them.
Now, usually, all this leaked information doesn't come back to you—people have the sensibility to keep the secret secret. And the world goes on that way just fine. Ten people will know about something embarrassing you did, but, because they are aware of the rules of our culture, they won't tell you they know, and you can go on leading your life pretending nobody knows.
The problem with the privacy after the advent of the Internet is not that these people now know your secrets. The problem with the Internet is that it makes the slip-ups of the third-parties public, permanent, and irrevocable. It vocalizes the maid-and-butler conversations that we all managed to pretend weren't happening, and, in doing so, ruins our collective facade of propriety.
And, unless we throw away everything about how the Internet works, we're just going to have to learn to work around that permanence. If anything, we need to kill the desire for sites like Facebook, not Facebook itself; we need to remove ourselves from our collective lecterns and podiums before we ruminate upon others' secrets. And that's hard–that's changing human nature, or at the very least, the nature of Western society. But that's what we have to do, if we want to keep this gift of a worldwide network of permanently-remembering machines alive.
(And note—what Facebook is doing right now has nothing to do with all of this. Everything that Facebook has done to "decrease" the privacy level of its userbase could have been done by a third-party by collecting the login details of a few not-particularly-privacy-conscious[1] volunteers and then spidering Facebook from their viewpoints, re-building its social graph within their own servers. This could still be done today, and is not an exploit that can be patched in any way, shape or form. As I said: social networks are inherently public.)
[1] Like these: http://www.silicon.com/special-features/protecting-your-id/2...
Saying that something 'could have been done by someone else' does not prove the 'right-ness' or 'wrong-ness' of it.
And you skipped over the point I made above—whether or not Facebook did anything wrong (let's say it did, so we can stop arguing), that is immaterial as long as social networks exist on the Internet, because they all do exactly the same thing, just not as visibly or as quickly. If you don't like what Facebook is doing, you need to face up to the fact that you just don't like putting your social network online, and accept that nothing—not a Diaspora, or a private mailing list, or anything else—will ever plug the hole that has been made in "privacy" by the advent of digital information.
Yes, it causes more of a headache for Facebook (or any service that opts to follow that route), but it sets a level of expectation and puts everyone on level playing field.
As it stands right now, unless I'm prepared to read a document that's longer than the Constitution, I pretty much have no idea what they're doing with information that, yes, I'm willing to share with friends, but not the world.
It's the shifting sands thats uncool.
Instant Personalization was a bad idea, but everything else was pretty straightforward.
Facebook knows people don't pay attention to details, and even if they tried to, they couldn't figure it out.
If you truly disagree, I'd say it is because of the curse of knowledge...you've understood this type of thing for so long, that you can't imagine what it's like to not understand it.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_brags_35_adjus...
Most people understood what was going on. You and many others are assuming otherwise without any evidence to back it up.
The reality is that if you want it to be facebook is a lot more private now than it was in early 09.
I may have mentioned before that I have several fb profiles with which to do security research. Last year I could have picked up a whole load of information on just about anyone - today, it's either a lot more difficult or insanely easy (mostly the former).
And that "ease" is simply a product of Facebook hiding controls or encouraging people to be open. that is what we need to focus on.