More to the point, do you trust Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook?
In this telling article from The Register, Zuckerberg apparently is more than happy to give his friends private info on Facebook users. The chat transcripts were from 2004, when Facebook was primarily being used by students.
But moreover, the more press their recent privacy changes are getting, the more Zuckerberg and his cronies show their true colours. They think it’s your fault that everyone can see your information, because you’re publishing it. If you want it private, they say you shouldn’t put it online. They also say that most people are happy with the new public “privacy” settings. But I’m going to take a stab in the dark that most people simply have no idea of the consequences. Some say they know, but think it isn’t as bad as everyone’s making it out to be, while others are just blissfully ignorant of the whole debacle.
One of the execs — Elliot Schrage, VP of public policy at Facebook — wrote a Q&A response published by NY Times. It has such notable quotes as:
“It’s clear that despite our efforts, we are not doing a good enough job communicating the changes that we’re making.“
They’re not saying the changes they made were wrong, they’re saying they didn’t communicate it well. But I believe that was intentional, because if they did communicate it better, more people would be pissed off. Schrage says that the controls are still too confusing for some people, implying that they’re going to dumb them down even further. Which will mean more will be public by default, because they don’t want to confuse the poor users.
Of course, the result will be that applications and external websites will be able to access even more information about you than ever before. As far as I’m concerned, even having settings that allowed anyone and everyone to access your info is fine. But setting those as default is stupid. Schrage claims that of the info that’s shared, it all remains perfectly anonymous because they don’t share your name, but that’s a complete lie. With the new settings, things you Like (yes, with a capital L) are completely public. You now effectively join a “group” which shows everyone who Likes it.
For example, if you like pancakes, and you mention it in your profile, you will join a mass group made up of everyone else who has said they also like pancakes in their profile. The only way for you to unsubscribe from the group, is to not mention that you Like it.
Previously, Liking something was private. Only you and your friends could see that information (and maybe friends-of-friends if you allowed them). But now, you’re part a big group of pancake lovers, and everyone on the planet can see that association. Your only way to control that is to remove it.
Facebook’s response is that if you don’t want the entire planet at large to know about it, you shouldn’t be saying it.
Hmm.. I don’t think so somehow. Personally I prefer a bit more control over my information and my privacy. I don’t trust Facebook, and I sure as fuck don’t trust Zuckerberg with my info. He’ll gladly sell the info to advertisers, and as has been shown, gladly give it away to his friends to show them how big his dong is. Someone whose morality is that low, won’t have changed over the years.
As mentioned, I’ve deleted my Facebook account, and won’t be going back to it. Even if they change the privacy controls back, I simply don’t trust them. Many others will continue to do so because they don’t care or don’t know any better, but I think that this time Facebook have done a lot of damage, and this will hurt them more in the fuckups they make in the future. Unless they eat some humble pie (and publicly add it to their profiles), I don’t envisage them lasting long. Enough people are getting pissed off that some geeks are bound to be working on alternatives in secret.
One, Diaspora*, is doing so very publicly and riding on the Facebook hate wave, but I’m not sure that their offering is going to have mass appeal. It appears as if they’ve just picked out a bunch of security and privacy buzzwords and thrown them on a webpage saying that’s what they’re going to do. How they’re going to achieve end-to-end GPG encryption in a non-intrusive way, I haven’t yet fathomed. Of course, it’ll be needed because it’s going to be a “distributed” service, so you won’t want people prying on your data in plain text. But just as to how and why a social network should or would be distributed, I can’t grok. I would have thought that a central system would be the way to go because if it’s distributed, then it sounds like not all content will be available all the time.
It all sounds a bit odd to me.
