A Contrarian Stance On Facebook and Privacy

macslocum writes "Amid the uproar over Facebook's privacy maneuvers, Tim O'Reilly offers a contrarian view. He writes: 'The essence of my argument is that there's enormous advantage for users in giving up some privacy online and that we need to be exploring the boundary conditions — asking ourselves when is it good for users, and when is it bad, to reveal their personal information. I'd rather have entrepreneurs making high-profile mistakes about those boundaries, and then correcting them, than silently avoiding controversy while quietly taking advantage of public ignorance of the subject, or avoiding a potentially contentious area of innovation because they are afraid of backlash. It's easy to say that this should always be the user's choice, but entrepreneurs from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg are in the business of discovering things that users don't already know that they will want, and sometimes we only find the right balance by pushing too far, and then recovering.'" Facebook has confirmed it is working on more changes to its privacy policy in response to feedback from users.

Comments

Tim wants us to tell him why he's wrong

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So here it is:

1. Users do not know the boundary conditions until someone's privacy has been abused - if they're paying attention and understand the issue.

2. At that point in time, most users will have already shared too much - and once their privacy has been breached/sold, there's no undo button.

3. Users have to spend time demanding their privacy rights which may or may not be given.

4. We don't need to research where the boundary conditions are because once you know who's likely to access what information, it's not that complicated.

The only question here is whether Facebook et al have a duty of care to their users. Morally they do, legally they generally don't and, financially, they're best of selling as much as they can get away with.

Witness the clash, and hopefully the prelude to the exodus. If Google had their act together, they could clean up. Perhaps it's a good thing they don't.