Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
"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.
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...
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?
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.