Why Facebook is Wrong: Privacy Is Still Important
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience this weekend that the world has changed, that it's become more public and less private, and that the controversial new default and permanent settings reflect how the site would work if he were to create it today. Not everyone agrees with his move and its justification.
Has society become less private or is it Facebook that's pushing people in that direction? Is privacy online just an illusion anyway? Below are some thoughts, based primarily on the pro-privacy reactions to Zuckerberg's statements from many of our readers this weekend. Though there is a lot to be said for analysis of public data (more on that later), I believe that Facebook is making a big mistake by moving away from its origins based on privacy for user data.
In Facebook's early days, and for the vast majority of the site's life, its primary differentiator was that your user data was only visible to other users that you approved friend requests from. As of mid-December, Facebook users were no longer allowed to hide from the web-at-large some information including their profile photos, list of friends and interests in the form of fan pages they followed. Text, photo and video updates shared on the site have always been by default private (friends only) but if you'd never changed your privacy settings before last month, then Facebook suggested you switch them to make those updates publicly visible to everyone. That became the new default.
Here are three reasons why making some of this data public by requirement and some public by default is the wrong thing to do and why society is not in fact changing the way that Zuckerberg claims it is.
See also: A Facebook Proposal: Let's My Gmail Contacts and Google Reader Subscriptions Public (Satire)
Evolving Preferences Don't Justify Elimination of Choice
Mark Zuckerberg might be right, people probably are becoming more comfortable telling the world at large about more and different parts of their lives. Why does that mean it's ok to take away peoples' choices and force them to make public some of their information all the time? That just doesn't make sense.
Privacy is a fundamental human right and while that may seem less true when we're operating on corporate turf like Facebook, Facebook used to be based on privacy. Why give it up so easily? (Isn't it a cause for concern that so much of our civic interaction now goes on through this and other corporate channels?)
It's very hard to believe that the hundreds of millions of mainstream Facebook users are wanting to throw their privacy out the window - and if Facebook believes they are, why not just ask them clearly?
Privacy Doesn't Just Mean Secrecy
This Summer we wrote about the academic research of University of Massachusetts-Amherst Legal Studies student Chris Peterson, who argues that an accurate and contemporary understanding of privacy is based more on the integrity of context than on absolute secrecy. Peterson tackles the contemporary reality of privacy on Facebook in a very readable draft thesis paper titled Saving Face: The Privacy Architecture of Facebook (PDF).
Peterson argues that the idea that anything published ought to be understood as intended for public distribution is an antiquated understanding from the era when publishing was expensive and required a lot of effort. The opposite is true today, it's free and easy to publish - so information at different levels of appropriateness for public eyes is being published. Why not support that?
But at any rate they could plug into your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." - George Orwell, 1984
If a college friend took photos of you drinking in a bar and showed them off to people in church, you might feel your privacy has been violated in both appropriateness and distribution. The bar is a public place, though, and not completely secret. Thus the need for a more sophisticated understanding of privacy that is more than mere secrecy.
By pushing your personal information and conversation through activity updates fully into the public, Facebook is eliminating any integrity of context that these conversations would naturally have. Posted updates can be directed only to limited lists of Facebook contacts, like college buddies or work friends, but that option is buried under more public default options and much of a user's activity on the site is not subject to that kind of option.
Many People Need Control Over Personal Information
Do people no longer need to keep access to some of their personal information online limited just to trusted friends? Facebook seems to be arguing that they don't.
There is a long list of people who clearly do, though, including: people who've escaped abusive relationships, people with marginalized religious or sexual preferences, people who fear losing their jobs or who've been pushed around by bullies throughout their lives. That list adds up to a very large portion of the world, in fact. The group of Ivy League elites who run Facebook might think there's no reason to be able to control access to their personal information, but many of them are less socially vulnerable and have less need to control their personal information.
Consider this comment left by one of our readers in response to Zuckerberg's statement this weekend.
"As a person who is being stalked for being an innocent bystander in a child custody case, I can tell you that losing my choices over what is searchable or not is huge. I have nothing to hide nor be ashamed of but the loss of choice for my privacy has hit home in a poignant manner."
Stories like that are far more common than you might think and removing user control over what's public removes the ability for millions of people to safely participate on Facebook.
More than millions, tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world have reason to limit visibility of their personal information from the web but still want to be able to share that information with trusted contacts. Facebook became a huge success on that premise and ought to be able to continue to thrive without doing a 180 degree turn on privacy.
Coming soon: The positive side of Facebook data made public. Hint.
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Context is an important issue - and it's something that Facebook really can't control yet.
Bang on as always. It is that context that is part of the issue. What I find ironic in myself is that while I live a lot in public (as you do Marshall), there are things that I still want private.
Great post Marshall. There are quite a few of us who use Facebook and don't want to expose every nook and cranny of our lives. The perspective of a very young management team is certainly interesting, but absolutely wrong when it comes to knowing how we all want to live.
Going to Facebook right now to confirm my privacy settings are intact.
I agree. This seems like a very small shift until some sorority girl gets hacked to death by some stalker who just figured out where she was by checking her Facebook profle. Zuckerberg is relying that people are mindful of these sorts of things. Relatively speaking, most people are new to social networking and might not think of things ahead of time.
Great post - completely agree. It's all about having the choice.
Facebook's push for public data is shameless and seems to be the means for keeping up with the Jones' (Twitter). I'm guessing the management of Facebook feels (and is, sadly, probably right) that the majority of their users won't notice or care.
My hope is that sometime soon, online privacy will come to the forefront of the average web user's thinking and weak policies and settings buried deep in the apps will become a thing of the past.
We're close to releasing an app that views user privacy as having a high importance (whether the user expects it or not). While we could likely monetize our customer data easily, we'll take the high road and work on building long term trust instead.
Good post Marshall.
Love your work and love your site.
However, as far as I can tell, and I've followed the new defaults and the discussions very closely - it is possible to roll back the changes Facebook has made. profile pics and some information has always been available publicly, and you can still keep others from seeing your list of friends.
that said, it took me a lot of work, and the help of other vigilant facebook friends posting how-to's in the days following the new changes.
I thought it was a hassle, yes, but it also gave me a chance to re-think some things.
One positive is I can chose to make certain posts public. I have done so.
on the other hand, it was a lot of police-detective work to find out about all the various settings and where they lived to maintain my comfort level with this service. If they went any further I would end my relation ship with FAcebook no questions asked.
BmoreKarl - I'm afraid that's not true. See this Facebook blog post http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130 they just made it possible to remove your friends list from the front of your profile, that info is still publicly available and can no longer be made otherwise. :(
Well said, Marshall. Facebook has changed.
One some level, however, I wonder if the answer for those who want privacy there is not to join. Or to leave, if the ToS becomes too unpalatable.
Facebook is a private online social network. Fighting for electronic privacy on the Web itself is dodgy enough, given the interests in play around the globe, as the world's intelligence agencies mine our digital communications.
AS you hint at the end, Facebook's route to revenue may be through sentiment analysis or other mining of the phatics of its users around given products, services or performances.
If people don't care to be part of the digital Skinner box, why not leave?
"Mark Zuckerberg might be right, people probably are becoming more comfortable telling the world at large about more and different parts of their lives."
I don't think it's that people are comfortable with lack of privacy as much as it is that they're resigned to it, or don't even realize things are public that they've assumed are private. I know that many of my contacts (especially parents and grandparents) haven't got a clue how to go about protecting their privacy on Facebook. I've been on social networking sites for well over a decade and still get confused with FB's muddy options at times. (I have a friend that jokes about checking FB's privacy options every day to see how they've changed. He can even list changes that took place over several days in just one week! And the average user is supposed to keep up with that?!!)
I think the average user cares very much about privacy. What they need is easy to use, understandable options that are transparent both to the original poster and all who comment on that post.
@Alex who said, "If people don't care to be part of the digital Skinner box, why not leave?"
I have several friends who have done just that.
Great post Marshall. I just heard from a friend today who was trying to get a little more private...and I for one remain perturbed that my fan pages etc. are now part of public consumption where I have no choice in the matter. The FB folks are so so smart - but they need to be careful, at some point, about a backlash - there have been plenty of false rumors already. I think it will only take one terrible story - and between your excellent analysis and for example TechCrunch's piece today about the "master password" -- it is really hard to regain trust.
The good news is -- these folks are so smart, I have faith they will figure it out.
--Al
You never know...just wait and see what the world will be like in 5-10 years. People's lives will be placed under a microscope like never before.
Once again, excellent, excellent post, Marshall. I totally agree that this is a move in the wrong direction. As I wrote on HuffPost here (in response to your Zuckerberg piece 1/9), opening up all of your data makes sense for a site like Google or Twitter, but NOT Facebook -- not based on its past and the way it was built.
Very good post, I very much agree that privacy is a very important issue. If there is no privacy of your private data then its all public and cause so many unwanted problems. Also the risk of fraud and hacking increases.
One of the problems with the privacy changes is how Facebook seems sneaky and shady in their implementation with bogus excuses like their CEOs last interview. Now many things they are doing make you question trusting them. Does this new feature in Facebook for iPhone to sync your contacts mean you just uploaded all your friend and family personal phone numbers to Facebook? Or was this just so nice of Facebook to load our contact list with pictures of friends? Why does Farmville need access to ALL of a users info? What does their political or religious view have to do with their sim farm?? I avoid Apps like the plague because they have access to everything and being FREE, you just have to wonder where they make money.. selling my friends list? selling my political view? Sniffing my status messages to determine my underwear preference? Scary to imagine.. Every line in their database for me now just says "personal"!
Good read, Marshall.
Facebook is not Twitter and should not try to become something like it. Of course it saw it selling real-time data to search engines and liked to do so, too. Now it wants more.
Naturally for social networks, there is a conflict of interests between providers and users. Providers want to maximize the network effect and thus, the data being produced. Users naturally want to socialize (Maslow's hierarchy of needs) and, subjectively, want their privacy to be preserved. (That users also act irrational is another story which providers tend to exploit. In my PhD thesis I call that Privacy Theatre.) To claim that these habits or needs have changed within a couple of years is problematic. Every social network positions itself somewhere between these amalgam extremes and makes a value proposition to its users. It should not break with an original value proposition.
I agree that context must be given to users in order to control their privacy. Choudhury in 07 and 08 did some great work differentiating context into communication context defining what is about to be communicated, and social context describing to whom a piece of information is accessible.
Cheers,
Alexander Korth
Facebook is dead wrong. The next big thing is going to be small, contextual, and private social networks. We're thinking hard about this at Ask My BrainTrust (http://AskMyBrainTrust.com).
I'll go back and read your full post (I always do), but I didn't want the time lapse from beginning-to-end to lessen my distaste for what Facebook is doing.
I ONLY used Facebook because it was private (I.E. Not Myspace), I use Twitter precisely because it isn't private - it's a totally different experience that serves a different puropse and thus I post much differently.
I want them entirely separate.
The power of Facebook's network was the IRL (In real life) aspect, the accuracy of the social graph that can produce, and privacy of it all. They've tried to ween us off of that, and as a result, I rarely if ever visit Facebook.
The power of Twitter's network is that it's entirely by choice. I chose to follow these people because they are brilliant, share similar interests or business objectives. Not because they went to school with me, grew up in the same town, etc. 90% of those people I have nothing in common with anymore.
When you start to merge those things, they stop working.
People don't mind helping strangers on Twitter. But should that same person send you a friend request, start commenting on your wall, etc - you've crossed a line. It's an obligation now. Or, depending on how you manage your facebook account, just not comfortable. We talk on Twitter, we don't need to ruin it with the formality of Facebook.
Similarly when your high school friends or your boss start following you on Twitter - you start to filter what you say. Subconscious as it may be, it's not the same experience.
Facebook - A place to connect with people you totally forgot about, and awkwardly try to rehash the past.
Twitter - A place to connect with brilliant stangers, on your time and terms. Make the friends you wish you had.
Facebook is dead wrong. The next big thing is going to be small, contextual, and private social networks. We're thinking hard about this at Ask My BrainTrust (http://AskMyBrainTrust.com).
Facebook is all wrong here.
They should continue to differentiate themselves as the private, friends & family network. I find different uses for Facebook and Twitter. They didn't need to be directly competitive. Facebook made it a competitive, public battle unnecessarily.
By trying to become Twitter, you're actually making me make a choice and right now, Twitter would win (if all was public).
And just me or has Facebook completely stopped innovating as it used to?
Also, Facebook Connect is the devil. It's convenient (extremely so for FB themselves), but I don't want everything connected (and posted). It was usable when Facebook was an island of people I knew. Now it's a web property designed to maximize profits. I'll pass.
Privacy isn't a human right. It's a choice. Like joining Facebook. The fact that there is an optional sign-in here with Facebook and Twitter contradicts everything this article says. If you want privacy, don't join Facebook. Very simple.
Privacy is important. Some of us joined facebook when we thought they cared about Privacy, and now they own all of our data.
Facebook is becoming a very bad company, after their recent privacy update you could still hide your friends list. They changed this without telling anyone.
Over 2 million people have joined a group to protest these moves and contacted facebook who has refused to respond. They don't care about their users or privacy anymore.
That group is at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=27233634858
im agree with you. but in every medium there is a mistakes happened so forget it and keep enjoy the facebook fun.
@rufus.t.firefly guess what, if facebook removes these privacy options thats what people will do close their facebook accounts.
Apart from what Mark Zuckerberg said, I guess individual facebook users should practice security measures on their own in order to avoid attacks and other privacy issues. Hackers will always be around and it would be an enormous undertaking for facebook to manage 350 million subscribers 24/7.
http://bit.ly/avoid-facebook-hacking
Interesting post and good examples. Looking forward to the "Coming soon" article hint in the end to get that side of the coin as well.
great discussion here. Keep sharing, I'm staying tuned for more.
You make a lot of sense and in a paid application I would expect the site to honor the agreement. FB, however, is a free consumer site used by millions of people and they have to pay the bills and generate a profit some time.
However, Zuckerberg (and Eric Schmidt) is being a bit disingenuous and self serving by claiming that the world is getting more public and less private. Say who? even if that is true people still want to keep some things private.
Bravo! Now put your website where your mouth is. I see you still have links to "Sharr on Facebook." I'm not advocating the elimination of choice, but where are the other social links? Orkut? Delicious? You know them better than I do. We can only move away from Facebook's bad choices (or send them a message) as a community - and that includes RWW.
What's striking about this issue is the hubris of Zuckerberg and his colleagues at Facebook who seem to think that just by owning a large Internet property that they can dictate the direction of societal trends and preferences (around privacy in this case).
I have blogged about Facebook being the "Microsoft" of social media. Such arrogance as this latest stance by Zuckerberg is yet more evidence in support of such a view.
Facebook is a business. And as a business it needs to make money. And freeconomics is not gonna cut it. This move is not about privacy. It's about money. When it comes down to it, if you don't like what they're doing with THEIR site, don't use it. Vote with your money by not using/buying the things you don't like.
Zuckerman is a jerk. I've removed myself from Facebook.
First Facebook is 'only' for college kids, then teenagers, then middle aged parents. I'm pretty sure Zuckerberg doesn't even know what Facebook is.
What I find most disappointing is how Facebook's popularity increased after it became a terrible site. Once upon a time, Facebook was a fairly isolated networking tool for close friends that was basic and clean. Now you have groups, walls, apps, and people's general annoyances that I really don't care about.
I deactivated my Facebook account over a year ago and every time I read about these clowns in the news, it seems like website is just getting worse and worse.
But hey, Zuckerberg has money right? And because of that, all of our opinions (yes...even the article writer's) are completely irrelevant. Oh well, keep using the site and complaining about it at the same time, it's not like your visits aren't generating add revenue to make Marky Mark even richer.
I guess I'm just a grouchy old man, reply away lemmings with your witty replies of how I don't understand business models and economics.
A good site has become terrible, end of story. However you want to spin it doesn't change that fact.
Today, I think we need to respect privacy by default more than before.
I used to agree with Eric Schmidt's quote from above but then I thought about Chris Peterson's context argument. I liken this argument to what happens now in festivals such as Mardi Gras and other Bacchanalia, where people get to cut loose at certain times and which been celebrated around the world for thousands of years. In the festival context, different acts are permitted than are at normal times. Until pretty recently, it was impossible to show pictures of people acting in the moment to the rest of the world. What is normal during the festival can be hideous in other contexts.
That's why Facebook's new attitude and Eric Schmidt's quote don't always cut it since it is now so easy to look at actions out of context. Reminds me of what Cardinal Richelieu said:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Glad to hear you keeping strong on it, Marshall.
Michael Arrington on Techcrunch, today, has as much as called us Luddites for caring about privacy. I think in these paperless times we MUST have some data sharing paths as secure as the U.S. mail!
I think the time has come when it shouldn't necessarily be true that one shouldn't have to avoid posting online anything one wouldn't be willing to see on a public billboard (as the saying went).
[@myTooq, I look forward to hearing from you!]
[triple negatives, yes I realize now, awkwardly worded...]
I completely agree. Mark Zuckerberg may be right in saying that world is becoming more public now. But does this statement means that our FB profiles should alo be made public? Hello....I need some privacy over my account. I don't want all my info to be visible to anyone in the whole world. what is the point in adding friends then, if everything is already public.
Mark Zuckerberg can make his profile public - that is his decision. But why make other peoples profile public too? And that too forcefully?
Maybe its time to look for another social media website now.
If you want to socialize, use facebook. If you want privacy, use inverse search. http://www.inversearch.com
Dear Mr. Kirkpatrick,
Thank you for your excellent post dissecting Mark Zuckerberg's indefensible "privacy" rationale/analysis, ditto Google CEO Schmidt.
Please see my post from today on the same subject; some of our points are the same, but perhaps I've added a bit of spice to the critique.
One of your commenters states that Facebook is a business--
fine, but businesses shouldn't lie, hide, or force policy or tech changes in order to avoid objections while raking in their money. Hasn't anything been learned since Sept. 2008?
Best Regards,
Best Wishes,
Amber Ladeira
amberladeira.blogspot.com
Errors Explored and Revealed
It's just a matter of time until anyone is able to faceboogle whatever they want on you. Facebook is again just trying to increase their user base with more and more penetration (ie, google search results) but at the end of the day i'd say i'm far more terrified of google.
This isn't about money. Facebook is rich. Web startups have always had backbone when fending off investors' demands, look at Twitter.
Facebook was so very helpful for #iranelection. Twitter got a lot of the headlines, but Facebook had *privacy*. Open Facebook up and you've in effect opened up the largest mass confession in history.
My guess is that very large pressures are being brought to bear on Facebook management, and Mark Zuckerberg has little choice in the matter. Since he lifted the idea from the beginning, he doesn't have a real problem with accommodating the pressures.
Many people see privacy from an inside-out perspective: "I'm not doing anything wrong, I don't mind getting targeted ads..." etc.
I see it differently: there are foreign intelligence agencies that would love a detailed profile on every single American. There are sinister forces at work across America right now; I can't help but see this Facebook privacy stuff as perfectly in step.
If someone from Facebook is reading this, please consider me one of the loyal-until-now people who will discontinue her beloved account instead of having all the information I posted while it was a private network open to a public audience. I don't have any embarrassing pics, etc. -- just information that is personal to me. I represent the 30-something professional females who make up a huge percentage of the user base.
I had forgotten about Eric Schmidmt and his comment.
I disagreed with it then and still do. As a business person there is a lot of legitimate stuff that I don't want public (biz plans, staff evaluations, financial information, product and IP etc). Work that I am paid to do, that is legal and that I don't want in public until and if I choose.
Same thing for my personal life. There are many legitimate activities that I don't want broadcast. I don't want people taking photos of my backyard unless they are given permission etc.
My concern about the loss of privacy is that the technology advances far more quickly thank society's ability to understand the implications. The majority of society doesn't think about implications of having to invest for 401(k)'s let alone understand technology's implication other than it is cool and they want it.
I don't believe that we comprehended or even imaging the issues that can arrive once the auto insurance industry, the health insurance industry and the legal system start determining how they can leverage the cookie crumbs that we leave everywhere. The RICO act was created to fight organized crime, but smart lawyers find ways to leverage it in other activities. Young teenagers sext and find themselves as registered sex offenders for the remainder of their lives (oblivious to the impact that this might have on getting a passport, future employment). Imagine the possibilities of applying more negligent manslaughter charges to drivers after examining the new black boxes in cars and GPS and cell phone and to build a case of illegal driving behavior (with a demonstrated track record of irresponsible driving patterns). SMART meters that suddenly register changes in electricity patterns that could trigger drug search warrants or EPA mandated pollution detection devices in the sewage system.
I'm not paranoid, just mindful that other countries have different rules that I must respect which makes me think about the wild west approach here in the US.
So just because we can doesn't mean that we should.
Great article, thanks for sharing. Privacy is more important now days then ever before in my opinion. It will be intersting to see how this whole 'privacy issue' pans and and if people are going to choose to leave the social networking giant.
Zuckerberg's statements are the equivalent to poking a sleeping tiger with a pointy stick. The minute users find they no longer control their own data and who "sees" it or who it goes to - Facebook will be toasted.
All the more reason to use MySace and mask your IP address while you use it!
RT
www.web-privacy.se.tc
Paul Orlando's Richilieu quote (#36) is spot on. The best of us have done stupid things; some not caught; with some lessons learned. The more public the info, picture, silly proclamation or posting, the more we are "caught", and we have to learn two lessons instead of one (don't do the stupid thing AND don't post it...). Facebook was built on the backs of people (college students, kids) who didn't understand these concepts, concepts that come with life experience.
Then consider the ramifications if we were a totalitarian state - which we were not too far from with the Bush-Cheney emergency powers wrt security after 9-11, or with McCarthyism in the 50s - well, we are back to Richilieu...
Facebook and Google are businesses, first and foremost. "Free" is the way to build the base that can be monetized. If the base doesn't want to pay, the base will be monetized by advertising or selling personal information or ? In both Facebook and Google, each of us (and our info or activities or actions) are the commodity. I suspect that Facebook's moves wrt privacy are, under the covers, legal steps to further establish Facebook's right to use, sell, or otherwise monetize each of us.
Statements about privacy and its trend by Eric and Mark are the kool-aid, and they want us to drink.
If you don't want your information put on the internet.....then don't...ya know...put it on the internet...not that hard...
people are too whiny..
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