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

Not So Much With The Internet

[WrongSizeGlass]

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.

That's an OK philosophy for developing a product, but when it comes to personal data and privacy, once it's "out there on the internet" (either publicly or for sale by companies who sell to the internet), there's no getting the genie back in the bottle.

There is no recovering when it comes to personal data on the internet.

Re:Not So Much With The Internet

[mickwd]

That philosophy of his sounds exactly like bullying to me.

"Sometimes we only find the right balance by taking what we can get, and then backing off when a victim fights back".

Rapidly losing respect for this man. Shame - the books are (for the most part) great.

Re:Not So Much With The Internet

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I came here to make exactly that point. On-line privacy is Pandora's box: once opened, you can never put whatever was inside back again.

There is merit in considering whether the status quo is really the way we want to continue. It is possible that our current views on privacy and sharing of personal data are unsustainable in the face of modern technology. It might be true that society needs to grow up and stop pretending everyone is perfect when they apply for a job, or that everyone accused of a crime probably did it just because of the accusation. Perhaps we do need to consider censorship and regulation of parts of the Internet, on a global scale, to protect minors from content they are not ready to experience yet.

However, if you're going to experiment in these areas, the way to do it is slowly and progressively, on a relatively small scale, and with well-informed test subjects who have volunteered in the full knowledge of what they are doing. There are parallels here with, say, researching nuclear power, or experimental tests of novel medical techniques. You don't start by building a power station big enough to destroy half a country if it goes wrong, or injecting your entire population with that new vaccine on the first trial.

Sites like Facebook, on the other hand, prey on the young and naive, and suck in as many people and as much data as they can, as fast as they can. But worse, as we have seen all too often recently, they are quite willing to make promises about privacy to those people one minute, and break them the next. There is no excuse for that sort of behaviour, and it's not some commendable way of "pushing boundaries", it's just abuse and should be penalised accordingly.

One comment I saw recently summed it all up: these are difficult questions, and it is going to take at least a generation to resolve them... not least because one generation has now given up any chance of ever doing so.

Re:In other words

[XnR'rn]

In my experience end users always end up as guinea pigs in real world testing, one way or ther other...

While it is bad, it is mostly inevitable.

Security and Privacy

[farrellj]

First of all, security is not a destination, it's a process. You can never reach a destination called "security". Privacy is the same type of thing. You can never achieve privacy, only increase it, or decrease it. It's always a multi-point balancing system where things like ease of access, functionality, and popularity, among others, are balanced in regards to how they increase or decrease privacy.

Sure, I might be loosing a bit of privacy using Facebook, but really, none of the information that I post there is anything I would be afraid or ashamed of handing out flyers containing that same info on a street corner. If you are putting your phone number up on it, it is just like having a listed phone number in the phone book. Same goes for your address. Ever posted a resume to a job listing site? All of your employment history is there.

This is not to say that Facebook is blameless, but like any public forum, treat the information you post there as if you were putting it up on a clear and open page on the internet that anyone can read or find in a simple Google search, and you will preserve an important amount of privacy.

ttyl
          Farrell

Tim wants us to tell him why he's wrong

[UpnAtom]

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.

Re:In other words

[sakdoctor]

It's easy to say that this should always be the user's choice

It should always be the user's choice.

'Ol Tim is forgetting something important.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In politics, there is something referred to as the "Overton Window". Essentially, the range of policy positions that are considered "serious", "practical", "respectable", etc. This doesn't mean that everything in the window has a chance of being executed(the opposition party(s) for instance, are virtually always inside this window, and they often don't get what they want); but anything outside the window doesn't even need to be argued against. It can simply be dismissed as "extreme", "unrealistic", "out-of-touch", and so forth.

However, groups outside of the window, while they cannot get what they want(under the political process, nothing stopping them from just shooting some people), do have the effect of gradually pushing the window in one direction or another. I'm not sure whether this happens because people use frequency of hearing an opinion as a heuristic for its popularity, or because having an extremist to point to allows former extremists to claim moderate credentials: "No, my plan to privatize virtually every state function I can is wholly reasonable. Look at those crazy libertarians... Now there is extreme." "No, I just support solid common sense and common decency to our fellow citizens, I'm not a wacko like those communists."

In the case of "online privacy"(such as it is), Facebook's little two-steps-forward-one-step-back-I-apologize-to-anyone-who-was-offended game is playing out an essentially similar dynamic. Every time they do something extreme, the new "moderate" position they "retreat" to is just a little bit further in the direction they want. They aren't just feeling out public opinion, they are working to shape it.

Re:In other words

[ScrewMaster]

Democracy has often been described as a "great experiment". Throughout history it has never been tried on as broad a scale as this one.

It still hasn't been tried, and there's a reason for that. In spite of much Presidential rhetoric about "this great Democracy of ours", and general ignorance of the subject by many people, the U.S. is not now, and has never been, a democracy. That's because our Founders were some pretty smart cookies who understood very clearly that true democracy cannot be trusted to work on any significant scale. And why is that? Because they also knew that We the People could not be trusted to cast our votes in a way that was good for all of us, and that democracy often tends to devolve into mob rule. Even so, much of their planning revolved around how to give voters the tools to grasp the bigger picture: our educational system for one, freedom of the press for another. All that was intended to produce educated, well-informed voters who would cast their votes wisely. That worked reasonably well for a long time, but the cracks are showing

Unfortunately for any form of self-government, people usually vote what they think is best for themselves, and the design of our representative republic tried to take that into account. The fundamental problem with such a system is that (sooner or later) those duly-elected representatives start voting only what is best for them, and warp the political system to the point where our influence over their decision-making is minimized. That's the state of affairs in our great "democracy" today. Who will watch the watchers indeed, and when you consider the amount of damage almost three hundred million of us have suffered at the hands of those 434 people in D.C., well, it's tragic, really, it is. But it was we who let them corrupt our educational system, it was we who have accepted an unprecedented (for us) level of media control.

So far as Facebook et. al. go, it's one thing to try something new, to experiment, push the envelope ... but when you know up front that what you're doing is going to damage some number of your own customers, you really should take a step back. Facebook can't get out of this by claiming they didn't know what they were doing, that it was just an experiment. They've demonstrated that they don't give a damn about their users, and that means those users should also take a step back, decide if what Facebook has to offer is really worth it. That's good advice regarding online services in general, when you get right down to it.