FacebookWatch

Great tool:

A lot has tumbled out of the woodwork about Facebook privacy over the last week, so here’s a quick review:

• via PCWorld: Facebook’s New Features Secretly Add Apps To Your Profile.
  

  If you visit certain sites while logged in to Facebook, an app for those sites will be quietly added to your Facebook profile. You don’t have to have a Facebook window open, you don’t need to be signed in to these sites for the apps to appear, there’s no notification, and there doesn’t appear to be an option to opt-out anywhere in Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings.

• via AllFacebook: Why Is Facebook Dead Set On Pushing Limits of Privacy?
  

  Does this mean that this is the way the world is going? Or does it simply mean this is the way that internet startups have chosen to “innovate”? I’d argue that it’s the latter and ultimately, Facebook will win when users have complete control of all their information.

  While sharing information has become an integral component of our daily communication, who we share that information with differs from person to person. With close to 450 million users, Facebook has plenty of opportunities to make money while simultaneously releasing new innovative technologies. None of this need to violate users’ privacy.

  Despite this, Facebook continues to release products that violate the users’ trust and ultimately, that’s going to be more damaging to the company than anything else.

  Nick is totally correct about this, and I think it’s telling that AllFacebook – which for a long time has seemed to be a simple fan front for Facebook – is calling them out pretty hard here.

• via AllFacebook: Chris Kelly Does Not Like “Instant Personalization”
  

  Facebook’s former Chief Privacy Officer, Chris Kelly, made a public statement against Facebook’s new “Instant Personalization” service, days after the program came under attack from a number of Senators. In a public statement, Chris Kelly distanced himself from Facebook saying, “Facebook’s recent changes to its privacy policy and practices with regard to data sharing occurred after I left the company.”

  Even Chris Kelly – who was in charge of privacy during Beacon – thinks this goes too far.

• via DeObfuscate: Facebook’s Anti-Privacy Monopoly

The biggest response I get from people when I point out these arguments is that “you can just delete your account”. But really, no, I can’t. Nor do I want to. I like using Facebook too much, and not having an account would feel like being a hermit. Facebook use is becoming a somewhat integral part of our society. But that doesn’t mean I can’t argue and fight against what I see as harmful anticompetitive conduct that destroys the bargaining relationship between Facebook users and Facebook, Inc.



• Rocket.ly and PrimeVector on why they (and you) should cancel your Facebook account.
• PeteSearch on how Facebook threatened to sue him for revealing some of their data practices.
  

Continuing our coverage of the recent changes to Facebook, let’s talk about the Open Graph, announced by Mark Zuckerberg yesterday at F8 and elaborated upon in a recent blog article. It’s also buzzing around the blogosphere and mainstream media outlets as they all try to figure out exactly what’s going on.

Here’s what we know:

1) Facebook will allow partner sites to detect your information and “personalize” your web experience.

If you’re logged in to Facebook, third-party websites will be able to detect that (though not your personal information directly) and allow Facebook to integrate their content with your social network.

Here are some examples of what your corner of the Internet may look like soon:

From the Washington Post:

From Facebook:

2) It’s not clear how the Open Graph will respect user privacy preferences.

Now, in some ways, the Open Graph is less intrusive than it may feel at first. It appears that it will only share information when you actively Share (rather than merely visit) a site. In this way, it appears to be space-shifting the Share/News Feed/Posted Items functionality from the News Feed to the site where the content is actually located. While this is certainly a big difference – location matters in privacy – it is not a major shift.

What could be a major shift is to what degree the Open Graph respects user privacy preferences. It seems fairly clear that if you are not Friends with another Facebook user, your Sharing of a story is represented as one of the nameless, faceless number that has anonymously recommended or Liked content, and if you are Friends with another user, your face and/or name may appear beside that number as well.

The question is: will the Open Graph respect Friends Lists? Suppose a user creates a Friends List labeled “Scrubbed” to which they assign bosses, subordinates, relatives, etc – the sort of people that you have to Friend to be polite but may not want having full access to your profile. And suppose the “Scrubbed” List cannot see status updates / shared content / posted links.

Will someone on a Scrubbed list be able to see your name or face next to the shared data? Or will the social system be smart enough to know that it shouldn’t show it?

This is a critical question because its answer has a huge affect on the privacy people can experience across the entire Internet.

3) Pulling Teeth – Or Personal Information, Anyway.

If you read Facebook’s introduction to their new system, you’ll see a note tucked away in the bottom right hand side of the page:

You can easily opt-out of experiencing this on these sites by clicking here or clicking “No Thanks” on the blue Facebook notification on the top of partner sites. If you opt-out, your public Facebook information can still be shared by your friends to these partner sites unless you block the application.

Emphasis added. Facebook not only opts you in to this service, it opts you in via your Friends as an extra backdoor to your content.

Now, you can go to this page and limit what sort of information your Friends can share about you. However, Facebook has killed your control here too:

When your friend visits a Facebook-enhanced application or website, they may want to share certain information to make the experience more social. For example, a greeting card application may use your birthday information to prompt your friend to send a card

If your friend uses an application that you do not use, you can control what types of information the application can access. Please note that applications will always be able to access your publicly available information (Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages) and information that is visible to Everyone.

Emphasis added.

Facebook, in other words, has specifically revoked your ability to control what information is available to third parties. These include internationally acknowledged private data like gender.

Without wishing to sound hyperbolic, this is madness, and this is loathsome. Not a single shred of support can be mustered by Facebook (or anyone else) to argue that this change is good for users. Facebook has not only designed the defaults of their site to be deeply confusing, counterintuitive, and antithetical to privacy norms, they have revoked the ability of users to control certain information at all. We challenge Facebook to tell the Facebook community how or why these changes benefit them, and why they are not allowing users to control these data.

Here is the bottom line:

Facebook has designed its system to screw over its users. It is inexcusable, it is intentional, and it must be stopped.

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.

…

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.

…

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.

Jonas and I have resurrected FacebookWatch from a long hiatus in light of the Open Graph excesses.

Updates to come.

FacebookWatch was heartened by the vote over new privacy policies for Facebook. We agree with Professor Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law, who wrote on his blog that:

This encourages Facebook users not to simply view themselves as users but as … citizens. Citizens of Facebook. The consumer/vendor relationship – governed by contract and fair trade law – is different from that of citizen/government. Citizens identify with something larger than themselves – if one’s country is attacked, it can feel like a personal attack in a way that a fellow bank customer’s account theft does not feel like a personal invasion. (”Today we are all Bank of Americans” doesn’t leap to the lips.) And in non-authoritarian systems, citizens have a voice in the affairs of state distinct from the metaphorical vote a consumer makes with his or her feet – or that a shareholder makes in a quaint proxy proceeding.

The New York Times published an article today called “Facebook at 5: Is it Growing Up Too Fast?” Like many recent articles about Facebook, it explored the meteoric rise of the site, its exponential expansion into the adult community beyond its foundational college audience, and the current controversial changes to policy and layout.

But the article had a key quote that cuts to the heart of FacebookWatch’s purpose.

“It’s not a democracy,” Mr. Cox says of his company’s relationship with users. “We are here to build an Internet medium for communicating and we think we have enough perspective to do that and be caretakers of that vision.”

No one thinks that Facebook is a government, and no one is asking that Facebook require a quorum before it can go ahead with any corporate policy. However, Mr. Cox is fundamentally mistaken both about the needs of users and what Facebook’s response should be.

danah boyd, in her insightful dissertation, outlined how Friendster was repurposed by its users who created “Fakesters” to advertise their bands and businesses. She identifies Friendster’s habitual quashing of the Fakesters as one of the primary reasons that people were driven from the site. The users had an idea of the social utility they wanted Friendster to serve, and Friendster did not allow them to meet their goals. Similarly, users have a similar idea of what they’d like Facebook to do. People use Facebook for very specific social purposes, and this new design has made it more difficult for people to use Facebook.

That is the root of the anger – not that Facebook has done something without consulting its users, but that Facebook has done something that gets in the way of what its users want to do, and now ignores their demands because they can.

But Cox is right. Facebook is not only not a democracy – it cannot be, as long as users do not have a way to effectively voice their complaints. Facebook cannot respond to the demands of the market if the participants in that market cannot make themselves heard.

Join the conversation at FacebookWatch. What should we, the users of Facebook, do to make ourselves heard – and perhaps more importantly, to make Facebook listen to us?

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of  Facebook groups protesting the new design outlined in our previous post.

The question is not whether people are dissatisfied with the new design, but rather what we should do about it.

Having hundreds of groups with a few members each is not an effective tactic for making our opinions known to Facebook. The movements are discrete and uncoordinated.

We would like to solicit ideas for what we should do. Is there one Facebook group protesting the new design that already has attained critical mass? Are there disagreements about what should be done to remedy the new design?

Open comment below, or email at tips [at] facebookwatch.org.

Facebook has rolled out a new design. In addition to several largely uncontroversial–or even welcome–changes, such as allowing businesses to have fully-fledged profiles instead of pages, it included an almost completely revamped UI that some have already dubbed “TwitterBook.”

Redesigned News Feed, from http://allfacebook.com

The new Fews Feed is dominated by status updates. The size of the font, as well as the mechanism of relaying status updates (no longer automatically prefaced by an “is”, implying a passive voice description of one’s present state, but rather inviting micropublishing) is clearly reminiscent of Twitter.

Moreover, since status updates are the most oft-updated component of a Facebook profile, inane banter has come to dominate what was once a functionally useful, if somewhat creepy and initially resisted, way to access information about what your friends have been doing on Facebook. Although the filters along the right hand side of the News Feed do allow the user to filter by type of content or by social organization (i.e. by Friends Lists or networks), it no longer appears to be as “smart” a feed as the old News Feed, which one could program to privilege certain types of content or certain contacts over others.

One user characterized the change as this: “[User] dislikes having to hunt for birthdays, events and photo updates.” This statement seemed to epitomize the pushback by users against the “Twitterbook” focus.

Facebook’s intentions are obvious: stamp out Twitter as the chief instant micropublishing platform by both encouraging users to update their status more often and by disseminating those updates more rapidly. The question remains, however, whether this is what people use Facebook for. Are Facebook and Twitter competitive or complementary services? Does Facebook’s attempts to compete with Twitter detract from the social utility of the service as described by the user quoted above?

FacebookWatch is considering methods for collective action. If you are a member of any Facebook groups opposing the new News Feed, please email tips [at] facebookwatch.org. In the interim, you can send a message detailing your complaints to Facebook through the feedback function located at http://tinyurl.com/fbookfeedback.