Yesterday, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg published a post with the title Building The Social Web Together. Excerpt:
Facebook has always focused on building ways for people to connect with each other and share information with their friends. We think this is important because people are shaping how information moves through their connections. People are increasingly discovering information not just through links to web pages but also from the people and things they care about.
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This next version of Facebook Platform puts people at the center of the web. It lets you shape your experiences online and make them more social. For example, if you like a band on Pandora, that information can become part of the graph so that later if you visit a concert site, the site can tell you when the band you like is coming to your area. The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken.
This civic minded message belied a deeper, and we believe more insidious, reality: Facebook is committed to eliminating the control users have over their data.
On 4/19/2010, Facebook engineer Alex Li described the new “Community Pages” functionality.
From this blog post:
Community Pages are a new type of Facebook Page dedicated to a topic or experience that is owned collectively by the community connected to it. Just like official Pages for businesses, organizations and public figures, Community Pages let you connect with others who share similar interests and experiences.
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Keep in mind that Facebook Pages you connect to are public. You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you’re connected to. If you don’t want to show up on those Pages, simply disconnect from them by clicking the “Unlike” link in the bottom left column of the Page. You always decide what connections to make.
Facebook has replaced “Becoming a Fan” with “Liking” something, but this seeming change in commitment – apparently fandom is too onerous a burden for the average Facebooker to bear – brings with it a change in functionality, because now associating oneself with a Page is now a public act. In other words, Facebook affiliations can no longer be rendered private. There is nothing you can do, short of “Unliking” a Page, that will keep your association with it out of the public sphere. Even AllFacebook has characterized these as “New, Half-Functional Privacy Settings.”
What utility does this give Facebook users? What benefit do they derive from having this control revoked? Can this possibly be justified from a user’s perspective?
We think not. This is a clear, unapologetic, unabashed effort by Facebook to eliminate the expectations and norms of privacy that users have developed with hardly a paragraph of warning.