FacebookWatch

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.
  

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.

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.