We all be hatin on Facebook, right?
errant.me.uk
errant.me.uk
If they want to change their privacy policy with respect to new interactions, ok, I can live with that (I may not like it, but I can "vote with my feet"). However, when they expose information they'd previous agreed to hold private, that's crossing the line, in my opinion. It's on that basis that I call them unethical and immoral.
The fact that they continue to refuse to speak directly to this point, only strengthens my opinion and the arguments made on this basis.
The previous information should retain its prior scope of exposure. If Facebook feels that is not technologically feasible or reasonable, it should be made unavailable unless the user explicitly opts to re-expose it under the new model. If that's more work for Facebook, tough. Being ethical isn't always the easiest course.
In my perspective, control over privacy was a major factor in building their brand. They seem to be undermining this very factor. Whether that will work for them in the long run, is an open question. It may be that their dominance in owning and controlling the leading "social graph" changes the paradigm for success; privacy is no longer needed to secure and grow the brand. It may also be that as the more general population gets up to speed on privacy and its implications, they will come to value the brand less. And as some other commentors have pointed out, some people are already beginning to find Facebook less interesting in their personal experiences, because their friends are increasingly policing their contributions and so the content is becoming increasingly generic and uninteresting, especially in volume.
(Purely anecdotal and somewhat incidental: I've been noticing how many of my own friends' profile pictures are now of their pets, or some or another piece of artwork.)
I suppose in a sense the problem is fb try to leave everything open by default. And, so, that also is something we need to argue against.
Further, it doesn't build a favorable impression to force users to continually monitor both the site and third party sources of news for changes to the site and resulting privacy ramifications, and to force them to navigate numerous on site dialogs -- and third party documentation in order to understand the changes and those dialogs (and now also to locate partner pages on the site in order to use the opt out / block links located only on those pages) -- in order to control to the extend still available what elements of their information are publicized.
Maybe for the bulk of users it just won't matter. But for those who do care, this all has done an excellent job of breeding both distrust and a tinge of exhaustion. I wonder what they think the split will be between those who "give in" and those who "get out". Even if a fair number "give in", it's going to be a while, if ever, before they lose the feeling of having been manipulated.
In that sense, as I think about it, Facebook is leveraging its position exactly as a bully would. It's using the social environment -- its control of your social connections through its site -- to coerce the behavior it wants. Maybe that's what we should be calling Mr. Zuckerberg and his executive team, a big old bully.
It's interesting because, actually, that hasn't happened. Not recently anyway. People have just noticed recently, or taken particular offense.
The nice thing now is that it is completely opt out.