Privacy concerns over Facebook’s latest breaches of users’ trust just won’t leave center stage.
A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
Voices calling to quit Facebook, industry leaders actually opting out or the call to start building an open alternative to Facebook are the culminations of a feeling of being fed up to the brim with the shameless, open, exploitative way in which Facebook is taking liberty to abuse its most valuable asset – namely us, each one of us, and on its way to world web dominance, forgets some very axiomatic business and customer related truths:
- We are here to serve you is not just a lip service of marketing departments. Consumers’ trust in this statement is the umbilical cord that ties us to a company or service. Abuse of this trust has a longer memory than the count of the no-nos that company has performed. Making personal data public by default is a direct abuse of what was originally a private service for people to create their social spheres for their personal use. A company given such data in trust, should have the same moral obligation as if it were trusted with our money. Money comes and goes – privacy breaches can have long term ramifications that money can’t undo.
- Facebook is guilty of a lack of distinction between our social spheres – personal social circles created for personal use and the desire to invade them because it somehow came to see our private circles as social media that can be searchable, usable, and as such turns each of us into a miniature promised land:
- A legitimate targeting spot ( fighting for our attention with their offerings and ads)
- A usable point of reference
- A point of sale for the commercial ends of the providers.
- Hubris caused the fall of mighty and powerful all along history. What kind of arrogance allowed Facebook to assume they can become the master of publicy and privacy – and for its own business model, mind you. It is not up to Mr. Zuckerberg to decide for us that privacy is over. No doubt Zuckerberg’s vision when he founded Facebook stems from a deep understanding of the time he lives in. Yes, he even shapes it -but does he own it? Introducing new technologies and services, even creating revolutions, is not a permission to thread on the wings of sharing that allowed it.
- Confusing what belongs to us with what companies can do to increase their profits, and assume that most users are not savvy enough to understand and actively undo, is a blinding vanity of people who think they are above laws, norms and regulations. Facebook’s history of users’ privacy abuse spells more than a series of local mishaps, it is a manifestation of a total ignorance of what fed Fecebook to grow into the superpower bully it has become..
- Facebook started out as a personal service that allowed me, the user, to express my personal distinctive colors, namely my interests, activities, emotions, with my social sphere. It is not public domain. It is not our place as users, to keep arguing with Facebook about what our privacy should look like and how basic, transparent our active privacy settings should be. For a company that provides an inherently trust based personal service, that should have been their basic design mission to start with.
- Where does it stop? Two recent moves – The Like Button and inserting location awareness have very disturbing ramifications:
- Facebook’s Like button will create a new kind f ad platform that personalizes content on both ends – matching the content of what you like through your like button marking with the content of the ad. That’s a more intrusive kind of personalization, because the matching is done to a personal attitude, not site visiting.
- Once exposing users’ locations without our consent or awareness, it will not stop there. What will stop Facebook from getting into the actual content of what we do, or think of doing?
Some will say this is what the semantic web is all about. Well, it is not about an Orwellian big brother future. It is certainly about the technologies that will allow it and about smart agents working on our behalf to automate some of our web interactions.
- In giant wars, casualties can eventually lethally wound the warriors. Was Facebook that blinded by its war against Google over web dominance that they really think they are invincible? In many historical revolutions the means became its actual end. When a commercial company, in prey of revenue streams, claims to be the canon of privacy related zeitgeist – you can take it at its face level or understand that you are watching the sliding door to Heart of darkness.
- Transparency is a central trust enhancer. How dare Zuckerberg take liberties and take control, like in totalitarian regimes, in the dark, without our knowledge, over our privacy taps? Who gave Facebook the mandate to define what current social norms are? Facebook, as part of its sharing policy, has recently allowed 3rd party applications and sites to be added to our profiles, without us actively registering to those sites and without our being able to opt out on this.
- In an interconnected world, interdependence, co-existence and mutual are the building blocks for a sustainable business. Threading upon customers’ trust, manipulating business partners –overplaying the business space – will eventually turn that space against you.
- The right of consumers to preserve their privacy is constitutional. Sure, having 400 million users spells a lot of potential money and a lot of potential power. I totally agree with Ryan Singel who says:
It’s time for the best of the tech community to find a way to let people control what and how they’d like to share. Facebook’s basic functions can be turned into protocols, and a whole set of interoperating software and services can flourish.
Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software such as Posterous to build a profile page in the style of your liking. You’d get to control what unknown people get to see, while the people you befriend see a different, more intimate page. They could be using a free service that’s ad-supported, which could be offered by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, a bevy of startups or web-hosting services like Dreamhost.
Indeed, all it takes to bring about the inevitable fate of narcissistic abusers is a small fraction of fed up Facebook’ users, that will spread the word, opt out on it and build an open alternative. Creating bottom-up, open-code, community owned social tools, that will ensure our active handling of our privacy and sharing policies will bring about creating new foood chains.
Taking the icentered way, everybody can gain from the food chains created around us. It can be done with our consent, our cooperation, bringing real value, fair reward to all participants in the food chains, including us.
That way a real value can be achieved, and providers of services and applicatons will realize that there is a better, more moral and not less rewarding, transparent and ecological way of conducting profiable business. It will reflect an ethical, value based new business culture that respects all, benefits all, can be trustworthy and embodies Lincoln’s free spirit namely, of the users, by the users and for the users
