On April 19th Facebook blogged Connecting to Everything You Care About announcing Community Pages and More Connected Profiles. "Profiles no longer are a static list of likes and interests. Now, they are a living map of all the connections that matter to you." The concern is that they are now also public.
I think it works this way. It used to be that the text on the Info tab on your profile was mostly just text. You would write what you wanted to express (favorite band) and those who could see your profile could see that. Some of these were links and you could click on them and see who else wrote considers that band a favorite. Now that text is actually a link to a public page for that text (say that band) and as a public page, all the members of that page are public knowledge. Facebook's idea is "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." Which makes some sense, it just now seems that you can't express some (profile) info just to your friends, and not to everyone, anymore.
The ACLU asks Is Facebook Having Another Privacy Disconnect? "Earlier this week, following up on its recent policy changes, Facebook announced its plans to create more dynamic profiles using "Connections." What exactly counts as a connection wasn't clearly defined either time, but seems to include things like friends lists, likes and interests, events, groups, and activities."
"If Facebook believes that you "should have control over what you share," it should resolve this by giving users real control over whether their connections can be accessed by apps and pages. Doing so still won't resolve other issues, like the "app gap" that allows your friends' applications to view your personal information without your knowledge or consent, but it would be one step in the right direction. Otherwise, the only way you can keep control of your information is to refuse to use Facebook to share or connect at all. And that's not what we mean by control."
They've since started a Facebook Privacy Action Campaign.
The EFF compiled a Timeline of Facebook's Privacy Policies. "Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information." Matt McKeon turned this timeline into a nice graphic.
Shortly afterwards EFF listed Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections which is a good list of issues of how Facebook is implementing this new feature.
DeObfuscate wrote Facebook’s Anti-Privacy Monopoly with graph showing various privacy events charted against Facebook's social network marketshare.
More and more people were concerned about this and started dropping Facebook. Dan Yoder wrote on Gizmodo, Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook.
One of those reasons is that they are technically incompetent. Boing Boing pointed out an issue with users IP addresses being revealed in automated email messages. Facebook did promptly fix it and their rationale was at least almost plausible.
Others are leaving Facebook too. "The people who run Facebook may or may not be evil. And I imagine that they will continue to be very successful; I have never been a good predictor of what technologies or companies will do well. But in any case I don’t think they’re very good at writing software. And I don’t want to devote my time to figuring out what Facebook may or may not be doing (knowingly or accidentally) with my information."
I can certainly agree with point that it takes too long to figure this out. The New York Times on tuesday has a chart of the all the Facebook privacy settings. "To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options." They also chart how the Facebook Privacy Policy has grown in word length from 1004 in 2005 to currently 5,830. The FAQ for the privacy policy is 45,000 words.
EPIC and 14 other consumer groups filed a 38 page complaint with the FTC over Facebook's privacy changes.
I first thought Facebook had a lot of promise because of the social network, apps and strong privacy settings. Their photo support showed this promise. I also thought there would be apps for netflix and amazon and newspapers and other sites with accounts and that Facebook could be the single signon solution the net was needing (and portals always promised). Users could have a single page with all their net presence and use privacy controls to selectively share that with friends. Instead we got inundated with quizes, mafia wars and farmville and the most important feature became Hide. Now I just use Facebook as I use Twitter, in fact that's literally it as my tweets automatically update my Facebook status. I rarely get comments on my tweets, but I do often get comments on Facebook. I also find out a lot about friends I'm not very close to via their status updates. I've found out about engagements, pregnancies, illnesses, and divorces via Facebook and yes that does feel a little weird. If they'd use twitter it would be equally effective, but far more of my friends use Facebook. I don't know as either of these sites is profitable, but Facebook seems like far more of a wasted opportunity.
No comments:
Post a Comment