Please DO NOT Sign into Facebook For The Entire Day of JUNE 6, 2010
The site that functions as one big popularity contest looks a little unpopular today. After a series of changes that eroded its users' privacy, Facebook has been getting smacked around in public.
A Wired blog post declared the widely-used social network "Gone Rogue (
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/)." A team of programmers looking to develop an open alternative to Facebook quickly raised tens of thousands of dollars (
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html) from strangers. A series of bold-face names in technology have canceled their Facebook accounts (
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/05/13/facebook.delete.privacy/index.html).
I am neither terribly surprised about this nor too sympathetic for Facebook. The Palo Alto, Calif., company has earned this scorn.
First, consider the changes it's imposed on its users. One turns many parts of your personal profile--your city, employer, hobbies and so on--into public links unless you remove that information. Another change can expose your endorsements of links at various sites, this one included, with a click of Facebook's increasingly-ubiquitous "Like" button. (Note that my first posts on these changes failed to capture their privacy implications.) A third, "Instant Personalization," shares some of your data, without your advance permission, with other sites.
Second, Facebook's ever-changing privacy-settings interface has made it difficult to monitor and control these changes. The company has an obnoxious habit of revising this miserably-complex system in ways that make earlier instructions inoperative and sometimes reverse prior settings of users. Without clear, concrete examples of who can see what you post, it's no surprise that some people wind up oversharing with the entire Internet.
Third, Facebook has done these things before. An alarming Flash animation (
http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/) illustrates how its default settings have steadily chipped away at a user's privacy over the past few years.
(You've memorized these disclaimers by now, right? Post Co. chairman and chief executive Donald E. Graham sits on Facebook's board of directors; former Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly is a friend from college; and many Post staffers, this one included, market themselves on Facebook.)
It's possible that Facebook's 400-million-plus users will settle down and accept these shifts as they've done before.
But Facebook has a fourth problem: It looks arrogant.
Maybe that's only perception. It can't help Facebook's cause that its most public face, 26-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg, can't seem to bother to put on a collared shirt, let alone a jacket or tie, before blathering on about how our notions of privacy are, like, changing.
But when I've talked to Facebook executives about the complaints I've heard from users, I've gotten airy defenses of the company's need to keep innovating. Sometimes they're followed up by vague allowances that it could explain these changes better--the dot-com equivalent of a politician's weasel-worded "if I have offended anybody" non-apology. And then they go on to tout heart-warming stories about how Facebook has helped adoptive parents find a child.
Meanwhile, from what I can tell the leadership at Facebook sincerely believes that the company can and should become the Web's dominant source of identity and authentication, providing a feature left out of the Internet's original design. But they don't seem to accept the thought that becoming such a social utility might require changes in their behavior.
Don't get me wrong: I like Facebook as a service, one that often works better than individual e-mails at keeping me in touch with friends. When I finish writing this post, I will probably click over to the site to see what's new with them. But I'll also hope that my friends now realize they should be as calculating in their use of Facebook as Facebook seems to be in its manipulation of their privacy.
