Do You Have a Facebook Account?

This video raises more questions than it answers. To me it's a giant wake up call to look into the matter further. Can citizens come together as a group and ask entities to explain themselves? [hat tip to Bruno Giussani]

Thoughts?

Comments

[mvellandi]

Saw that last week; very objective and kind of scary when we think about the implications.
I asked on Jeremiah's blog earlier, if there's a point when people would be willing to pay to be premium members; thus NOT having their information used/sold to third parties.

[Jonathan Trenn]

Yes people can form a group. But I doubt it will work. My guess is that the vast majority of Facebook users haven't really heard of the controversy yet. Or they barely have heard of it and aren't that worried quite yet.

Facebook's secretiveness is inadvertently helping it for now as we're all coming at them from different angles. There is no one major story and we can't seemed to get anything confirmed - whom they really follow, what they do with the info, do they really follow after we 'deactivate'.

The steady drip, drip could become really damaging, but the mainstream media doesn't understand all of the issues and the story is not much of a priority for them. That's unfortunate. I wrote a piece yesterday about it:

http://marketingconversation.com/2007/12/04/the-effectiveness-and-limitations-of-blogs-and-mainstream-media/

[Paul Chaney]

I was hanging with this until it morphed into what amounts to a conspiracy theory which makes Facebook look like a front for the CIA.

However, I am taking a closer look at their privacy policy.

[Jason Falls]

Well, you got me all fired up. I'm also using this response as the guts of my own blog post and video share on my blog.

------

Thanks for sharing this, Valeria. My first reaction is two-fold. First, it sounds like a bunch of conspiracy theory BS that the originators produced to take a chunk out of Facebook. I'd love to know more about their motivations. Yes, Facebook's policies are unreasonable and the community outrage measurable. I think this means Facebook will change them eventually. They're already backpedaling on Beacon, which has sparked the community to dig deeper into Facebook's policies.

But to connect their information mining to the CIA, etc., is a little too much for me to swallow. It's almost like they're saying, "Zuckerberg went to grade school with a guy whose mom's cousin's neighbor's babysitter's gerbil's original owner partied with Osama Bin Laden once. We're all going to die."

Obviously, I'm exaggerating to make a point. I, too, am bothered by the depth of information Facebook says they can rightfully mine and sell. That information in the wrong hands (or even the government's hands) is a violation of my privacy. But I also don't necessarily see my buying habits, surfing habits and such to be something I necessarily want to hide.

Case in point: If Facebook's social advertising model worked, I would stop seeing the buxom blonde singles add on my home page there. I very clearly have listed my status as "married." Smart advertising excites me because it could make my life easier. If the messages I'm most likely looking for or interested in are served up by the advertisers I'm most likely to be receptive to, I'll miss out on fewer purchase opportunities, sales or deals I may not have found otherwise.

Still, there is a fine line between knowing my tendencies and being all up in my business.

And this is the challenge that faces all of us ... advertisers, social networks, the government and us the users ... as we define what is on- and off-limits in out online experience now and in the future.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Mario -- that to me may sound dangerously close to extortion though. Pay me or I'll sell your info. Huh?

@Jonathan -- thank you for the link. I'll go take a look. Scale is useful when seeking answers. As is the weight or influence the person or group seeking answers has. To be clear, this is not an attempt at igniting a controversy. Just a way to ask the official story to explain itself.

@Paul -- legal sounding language is crafted to read boring and take time to understand so we just glance at it. We get privacy policies from every company and business, which again makes it hard to read each one and easy to assume they are all the same.

@Jason -- I have been thinking about smart advertising ever since I crafted that post on Web 3.0 and fleshed out some implications. I suspect the answer lies somewhere in between technical automation and people involvement. It would be nice if this were developed as a conversation vs. shoved down users' throat and then modified if they push back (how deep the change will go perhaps nobody will have the chance to verify).

[Susan Cellura]

In summary, are we finally seeing George Orwell's "1984" and "Big Brother" come to life, whether it wants to be acknowledged or not?

[Joe Raasch]

Hi Valeria,

I am a big fan of conspiracy theories and black helicopters - books of this genre fill my non-work reading list.

Here, Facebook appears to have made a mistake. That's it.

The continued conversation seems to help them via free public relations, versus hurt them. There are a fair number of people in a variety of media creating heat on the subject, but little light. Because there isn't anything to really 'light' upon?

Is this due to the nature of the standard or target Facebook customer? Do they really care?

(full disclosure - I do not have a Facebook account).

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Susan -- I am not really sure about big brother stuff like the one depicted here. And I think everyone is being reasonable and fair, yet Facebook continues to get attention in the VC community. Someone is getting rich and it ain't the users. Yet without users, there is no money. Quite the conundrum.

@Joe -- the only reason why I signed up on Facebook was to promote The Age of Conversation for a good cause and I put in an little as I could. I prefer face to face contact or phone whenever I can for connections. I think we don't care until it impacts us in some way. Human nature ;-)

[Carolyn Ann]

It's been conjectured, for years, that governments won't have to impose "Big Brother": society will do it for them, with eagerness. And so it seems to be passing.

Rather than bemoan the resumes of Facebook investors (which, if true, mean little), it might be more useful to concentrate on the fact that Facebook says it owns the data about your life. And work on two things:
1. Consistent, viable and people-friendly laws that provide some level of privacy.
2. A generic "Privacy Statement" that is lawyer-approved for as many jurisdictions as possible.

Not everyone would use the latter, but it would provide the basis for a discussion with Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc, etc, etc on why they aren't. It would also help us all when we buy software: "This package complies with the generic privacy statement, etc".

Let's face it: the information about us all is out there. It's easy to find, and getting easier. As people, we're generally more and more hurried: we have to master complex subjects and statements in the twinkling of an eye, and we have to do it repeatedly. The time for introspection and consideration gets shorter and shorter until it becomes nonexistent. We like, want and applaud the convenience of sites like Facebook, Google and others. But we're often surprised when we find out that what these companies hold on others, they hold on us, too!

Maybe it's just easier to acknowledge that the privacy dam has burst; all that's left is a vigorous effort to curtail the more egregious conditions that the so-called "owners" of this data want?

Privacy will probably become the #1 social issue for the Connected World. I can't help but wonder where the discussion will lead! (If it doesn't, maybe we're happy not having much of it?)

Carolyn Ann

[Richard Becker]

Valeria,

Always timely. Privacy and intellectual property IS the number one social issue for the connected world, we just haven't admitted it yet.

Paraphrased from old post of mine: Consumer Profiling is perhaps my least favorite trend, but consumers see it differently.

Overwhelmingly, consumers embrace profiling because they think can limit their own advertising exposure based on preferences, which means giving up privacy. They already accept it at ITunes, Amazon.com, and with Internet cookies.

I've always felt that the idea that, in the future, consumers can be pointed to a sales rack with the exact dress they are looking for (though the concept does not have to be this precise) is spooky because that means companies (and government) will know where we are all the time with future GPS features in our phones and cpus. And yet, when I ask any room full of people what they think about that, they always say ... sounds like a great idea.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Carolyn Ann -- I see the story of online community and behavior as potentially developing for good and bad at the same time. Good because it can allow people to support each other. A former colleague told me that the most help she received for her husband's health condition has been through an online community crated for and by people with family members wrestling with the same issue. Bad because every advance is also a double edge sward in the hands of people with less than noble intent. The Internet is not inherently bad, it just makes it much easier for people who may engage in less than above board behavior to do so. Of course, we endeavor to spread the good stuff like peer support and resources for illnesses for example. Yet, it is good every so often to check in with what else is going on.

@Richard -- anyone who can point me to a rack where the outfit I'm thinking about materializes is a genius and understands complex mathematics. I don't even know what I like until I see it. And I change my style and mind all the time ;-) The other interesting observation you prompt is that I purposely ignore automated recommendations. Preferring instead to explore new stuff. I suspect I am not the only one. In that case I may be a "moving target". As for people saying that is great, it is harder to think than to go with the flow, every single time.

[Marshall Sponder]

I just think whomever wrote the TOS on Facebook was overreaching. The CIA stuff is old news, this story has been around, in one form or another since 2005, but it's not all that far fetched.

I don't put anything past the government or CIA; but if they did create Facebook to gather all this information, how did they manage to be so good at convincing us to give it up to them? The government, even the CIA, is not known for being so Savvy.

But then again, maybe they've improved over time... maybe it's easier to to make people want to hand over their privacy (make it cool) than to forcibly invade it.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Well, good thing I don't publish new news, then ;-) Things are probably a lot simpler than any conspiracy theory would have anyone imagine.

Usually it's motive, means, and opportunity. Or maybe I read too much fiction. What I found interesting was that all of the information aggregated in one place builds a pretty substantial impression. And not a warm and fuzzy one at that.

[John]

I'm inherently suspicious of conspiracy theories, but... it's worth considering what can happen when the detailed data about you that exists in a social network (not necessarily Facebook) meets a subpoena from a government agency.

People can gather data with the best of intentions only to find it misused.

[Valeria Maltoni]

My grandmother used to say "hell is paved with good intentions" ;-) I think the nature of critical thinking is posing the question, as I wrote some other time -- interrogating reality. Thank you for joining the conversation, John.