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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.
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.
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.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.