FacebookWatch

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.

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.