8. Facebook has flat
out declared war on privacy
Founder and CEO of Facebook, in
defense of Facebook's privacy changes last
January: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more
information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That
social norm is just something that has evolved over time." More recently,
in introducing the Open Graph API: "... the default is now social."
Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you,
and own that data, but to make it available to everybody. Which would not, by
itself, necessarily be unethical, except that ...
7. Facebook is
pulling a classic bait-and-switch
At the same time that they're telling developers how to access your data with new APIs,
they are relatively quiet about explaining
the implications of that to
members. What this amounts to is a bait-and-switch. Facebook gets you to share
information that you might not otherwise share, and then they make it publicly
available. Since they are in the business of monetizing information about you
for advertising purposes, this amounts to tricking their users into giving
advertisers information about themselves. This is why Facebook is so much worse
than Twitter in this regard: Twitter has made only the simplest (and thus, more
credible) privacy claims and their customers know up front that all their
tweets are public. It's also why the FTC is getting involved, and people are
suing them (and winning).
Check out this excellent
timeline from the EFF documenting the changes to Facebook's privacy policy.
6. Facebook is a
bully
When Pete Warden demonstrated
just how this bait-and-switch works (by
crawling all the data that Facebook's privacy settings changes had
inadvertently made public) they sued him. Keep in mind, this happened just
before they announced the Open Graph API and stated that the "default is
now social." So why sue an independent software developer and fledgling
entrepreneur for making data publicly available when you're actually already
planning to do that yourself? Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don't
want their membership to know how much data is really available. It's one thing
to talk to developers about how great all this sharing is going to be; quite
another to actually see what that means in the form of files anyone can
download and load into MatLab.
5. Even your private
data is shared with applications
At this point, all your data is shared with applications that you install. Which means now
you're not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers, too, many of
whom are too small to worry much about keeping your data secure. And some of
whom might be even more ethically challenged than Facebook. In practice, what
this means is that all your data - all of it - must be effectively considered
public, unless you simply never use any Facebook applications at all. Coupled
with the OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting Facebook, but the Facebook
ecosystem.
4. Facebook is not
technically competent enough to be trusted
Even if we weren't talking about ethical issues here, I can't
trust Facebook's technical competence to make sure my data isn't hijacked. For
example, their recent introduction of their "Like" button makes it
rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social network.
Or how about this gem for
harvesting profile data ? These are just the latest of a series of Keystone
Kops mistakes, such as accidentally making users' profiles completely public,
or the cross-site scripting hole that took them over two weeks to fix. They
either don't care too much about your privacy or don't really have very good
engineers, or perhaps both.
3. Facebook makes it
incredibly difficult to truly delete your account
It's one thing to make data public or even mislead users about
doing so; but where I really draw the line is that, once you decide you've had
enough, it'spretty tricky to really delete your account. They make no promises
about deleting your data and every application you've used may keep it as well.
On top of that, account deletion is incredibly (and intentionally) confusing.
When you go to your account settings, you're given an option to deactivate your
account, which turns out not to be the same thing as deleting it. Deactivating
means you can still be tagged in photos and be spammed by Facebook (you
actually have to opt out of getting emails as part of the deactivation, an
incredibly easy detail to overlook, since you think you're deleting your
account). Finally, the moment you log back in, you're back like nothing ever
happened! In fact, it's really not much different from not logging in for
awhile. To actually delete your account, you have to find a link buried in the
on-line help (by "buried" I mean it takes five clicks to get there).
Or you can just click here. Basically, Facebook is trying to trick their users
into allowing them to keep their data even after they've "deleted"
their account.
2. Facebook doesn't
(really) support the Open Web
The so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its
fundamentally closed nature. It's bad enough that the idea here is that we all
pitch in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about
you. It's bad enough that most consumers will have no idea that this data is
basically public. It's bad enough that they claim to own this data and are
aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they are disingenuous
enough to call it "open," when, in fact, it is completely proprietary
to Facebook. You can't use this feature unless you're on Facebook. A truly open
implementation would work with whichever social network we prefer, and it would
look something like OpenLike. Similarly, they implement just enough of OpenID
to claim they support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary
alternative, Facebook Connect.
1. The Facebook
application itself sucks
Between the farms and the mafia wars and the "top
news" (which always guesses wrong - is that configurable somehow?) and the
myriad privacy settings and the annoying ads (with all that data about me, the
best they can apparently do is promote dating sites, because, uh, I'm single)
and the thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost
completely useless to me at this point. Yes, I could probably customize it
better, but the navigation is ridiculous, so I don't bother. (And, yet,
somehow, I can't even change colors or apply themes or do anything to make my
page look personalized.) Let's not even get into how slowly your feed page
loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is more annoying than anything else.
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