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Facebook Calls All-Hands Meeting On Privacy
CWmike writes "A Facebook spokesman said that the company will hold an all-staff meeting on Thursday to discuss privacy issues, but would not say whether executives are looking to make significant changes to the popular site's highly contentious privacy policies following a bevy of changes to the service." (More, below.)
"In an interview with Computerworld last week, Ethan Beard, director of the site's developer network, defended Facebook's policies and even said users love the changes that Facebook has made. However, it seems calls for people to delete their Facebook accounts, which have gathered momentum, have not fallen on deaf ears at the company. Adding to the perception of a crisis on hand, the NY Times profiled on Wednesday a project called Diaspora, which is creating a more private, decentralized alternative to Facebook."
Because they are going to need some, and soon. EVERY time they make a change to the privacy scheme, it's ridiculous and gets the whole user base riled up.
Serious? Our eyes and minds are being sold to advertisers and you don't find that troubling? We are not the consumers any more, we are the product. If society mimicked Facebook you're damned right there'd be privacy concerns. If I stop by a motorcycle shop to buy some oil and they sold that information to other distributors without my consent so they could bombard me with unwanted solicitations there would be hell to pay.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
A secret meeting about privacy doesn't bother you? Geez, talk about a tough audience.
"I see the clouds of a civil war on the horizon between users and the platform vendors as users want more discrete control over their history, privacy and data, and the platform vendors who drive advertising and data mining businesses."
The ability of Facebook to generate revenues requires the exploitation of their users data and their privacy - if they want to keep it "free" for the users. Otherwise they'll have to charge a subscription.
Advertising on pages for revenue? Enough to pay the bills let alone drive the sky high stock prices?
Ask the management of Digg and Slashdot about that.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
"Our eyes and minds are being sold to advertisers and you don't find that troubling?"
For a second I thought you were referring to the TV and Radio broadcast industry as it has existed for the last... oh,70 to 80 years?
This space available.
I believe he was saying a more disturbing problem was that most people don't care about the issues you mentioned.
They want lots of privacy for things THEY do. Just none for things WE do.
My opinion is that if you post personally identifiable information to a public website, and expect that information to be kept from all the world's eyeballs, you're being incredibly foolish.
I'm not saying Facebook has no responsibility here, just that people should take care to only share in a public forum what they are comfortable sharing with the entire universe. My Facebook profile contains nothing that I wouldn't want my mom, boss, pastor, or future employer to see.
I'm probably departing Facebook because... well... just watch the South Park Facebook episode and that sums up everything I hate about it.
Privacy? I don't post private stuff to a public website, no matter how much they promise only to share that stuff with "friends" and "networks."
dinner: it's what's for beer
The problem isn't the opt-in. The problem is the arbitrary changing of the TOS with little fanfare. I will grant you that I am a giant hypocrite since I doubt I'll be abandoning Facebook any time soon. I think I was able to deal with TV and radio because it was just broad advertising. Being targeted just seems a little creepier.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Just deleted my account. Screw facebook.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
"Our eyes and minds are being sold to advertisers and you don't find that troubling?"
For a second I thought you were referring to the TV and Radio broadcast industry as it has existed for the last... oh,70 to 80 years?
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
You can't take the sky from me...
I see it more like a meeting to tell everyone "if you don't shut up and smile to it, you're fired". And it's not sent as a memo because it could be forwarded.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not really. Users are product, but unlike most industries this "product" has legs and can walk off on it's own. The more product Facebook has, the more valuable it is to it's customers. The less product, the less valuable. Now, the major reason people use Facebook is that the other people they know also use Facebook. The larger a percentage of the people they know that use something other than Facebook, the less incentive there is for them to use Facebook too. This is one thing Google gets: no matter how profitable something may seem in the short term, if it scares off or runs off your product it's not a good idea in the long term.
And it isn't just this one thing. Facebook's gotten some press lately over employers looking over people's profiles. The new forced networks based on things like employer don't help people with jobs feel comfortable, which makes them more likely to drop off Facebook. Which makes everyone they know just a little more likely to drop off too.
The whole thing isn't linear. Reach a critical mass and your product base grows exponentially. Drop below that critical mass, and your product base implodes exponentially too. I think Facebook's starting to worry that if they don't do something they may drop below critical mass.
Thanks for that link. Well, I guess from now on I am allowed to tell Facebook users that they are "dumb fucks" according to the Facebook founder and CEO.
It always felt quite good not to be a Facebook user, but now it's even more pleasant!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
If you think it's OK that the Internet is turning into what the TV and Radio broadcasting industry has given us for the last 80 years, then yeah, it's all good. I, however, will fight this with everything I've got. It's worth it.
.
The only way to bring privacy and security to Facebook is to replace Zuckerberg with someone who cares about the privacy of Facebook users. Until Zuckerberg is replaced, little or nothing will change.
There will be no "getting a handle on the corporate takeover"- Corporate America sponsors the largest part of US "government"; there is very little divide between the two. In time it -will- turn into cable vision, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it. The cute little policy rulings by the FCC, the passionate wailings of the EFF are no more than attempts to hold back the tide with a rake- The last twitches of a failed republic. Take an objective look at things.... The power -will- follow the money; corporate America has and will continue to use phenomenal amounts of money to bend government to it's will; They've got all the time and money they need- do you really think they'll give up / stop?
Yep, in the end the panopticon emerged because enough people chose to opt in. No conspiracy required.
Actually, I help run a small but scrappy nonprofit dedicated to providing democracies with good information, and part of that is looking after the tools that make that possible.
http://www.omidyar.com/portfolio/global-integrity
I know it's Slashdot, but some of us actually do mean what we say.
This already has happened. MySpace's base is eroding, and we already have seen Friendster and Orkut essentially crater. I'm sure sooner or later, someone is going to come out with a social networking service that can one-up Facebook. Then if it can get people to move there, FB will get left in the dust as last year's social networking, similar to how Geocities is remembered.
FB needs to start valuing the privacy of its users. If not, there are people out there who will happily capitalize on this mistake and offer everything FB does, but better and easier to use privacy settings.
Five bucks says the meeting is less about how to respect peoples' privacy than it is about how to more surreptitiously subvert it.
I think the real problem is not Facebook, but a system that allows businesses to retroactively and without notification, change the the agreement that the user agreed to when business relationship was first established.
If Facebook wants to change the TOS, privacy policy, or anything else, about the service, they should have to require an affirmative opt-in from the user first. They have the right (in the absence of a contract) to cancel a user's account, on the service, but not to change the terms or settings. If they want to change the terms, they can either advertise how great the new features are, and ask users to opt-in to them, or they can put up a notification at the next log-in telling exactly what has changed, and require the user to accept or reject the changes. (Depending on how critical the changes are to the business, a rejection may require closing the account.),
In a just world, that is how all terms with a business should be. It is unconscionable to require the users to keep checking a document on a website with no notification that the terms have changes. And yet, Facebook, ISPs, credit cards, and many other businesses scam their users with such sneakwrap provisions.
:"Where did they all go?"
:::"Economies of scale happened to them."
Not so, the same fate befell the small players as did the big national ISPs and online services: They got squeezed out of the broadband market by last-mile carriers abusing their monopolies.
The issue with facebook is really rather simple.
Facebook's value for its investors is that it's a gigantic comprehensive advertising database where the marks *cough* I mean customers input all the data on their own. People put information into Facebook that they'd never tell someone taking a survey and you don't even have to pay someone to ask them the questions. Achieving this goal is basically top on Facebook's list of long term priorities, just as it will be on any other free social networking site which doesn't want to operate at a massive loss.
The conflict is that the users of facebook didn't sign up for that. They want and quite rightfully expect a certain level of privacy for the content they post on the site. You might argue that telling everyone about your personal life is the antithesis of privacy, but privacy is about your ability to determine your own level of disclosure, not having some specific level of disclosure which the older generations find appropriate.
Essentially the end result of all of this is that every 6 months or so, facebook tries to turn all the information it has into cold hard cash and shortly thereafter their userbase throws a wobbly and they have to back out.
One thing I find disturbing is that even when/if Facebook backs down, it has already given away your information. For example when they decided to put what you're a "fan" of in your public profile that any web-crawler can see. Even if they backed down, I'm sure that information is now stored in a number of databases outside of Facebook and you don't have to be completely paranoid to think maybe Facebook has a hand in this.
What a bunch of bullshit. The people moderating this nonsense up are letting their ideology show.
The difference between then and now is huge. For one, websites in general are more secure (you can't fuck up a messageboard anymore just by typing in !). They're much, MUCH more well-designed, just go look through archive.org for evidence of this. Forum softwares are DRASTICALLY better, instead of relying on geocities people register their own .com easily and affordably; e-mail accounts are MUCH easier to get (remember why hotmail got big?). Music, video (youtube, etc) are all easily transferred over the internet when it wasn't possible before. Internet shopping has matured greatly and amazon, newegg, and smaller sites offer great deals--yeah, yeah, ebay went downhill, whatever... So many amazing sites exist now that weren't even imaginable back then.
Yeah, let's just ignore Hulu (oh wait, that's the corporate takeover of the internet according to PopeRatzo), last.fm, all the blogs that have popped up by experts in their fields, the rise of bittorrent, Steam (for gaming), Google and the many peripheral services they provide, oh I could go on and on.
There's not much to whine about other then the death of usenet (although I insist it died because forum softwares improved and became accessible outside websites such as insidetheweb and ezboards) and the rise of spam.
The underlying technology is just vastly superior, if you disagree you can just shut up and go back to dialup and prove me wrong.
I like the idea, but it's a geek idea - not an average user idea.
As an example of what I mean, I went to the diaspora website as an average user, expecting an alternative to facebook. Instead of seeing "register here and create your profile", I saw several paragraphs explaining the distributed paradigm, how your local profile for different web-applications is stored elsewhere (on your computer or in 'the cloud'), and so forth.
Guess what? People don't want to read. People don't want to have to figure out a new paradigm that involves personal involvement. What people want is facebook, but with a better interface and security policy. (and with Zuckerberg nowhere to be seen)
How many people use citizendium over wikipedia? How many people muck with bittorrent or even grooveshark, vs. buying songs on iTunes? How many auction sites have usurped eBay, after they changed their pricing model, paypal affiliation, etc.? People just don't switch to something better-but-different, unless it's (a) familiar looking, and/or (b) totally ground-breakingly new *for them* (i.e. the background and model don't matter).
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban