The Case Against Facebook
Back when Facebook opened up its community to all colleges, I was one of the first people to join it under my Reed alumni account. I originally joined Facebook under the guise of being CTO of EllisLab, whose duties included keeping an eye on new technologies that might be useful to the ExpressionEngine platform. As more and more friends joined and Facebook’s networking capabilities expanded, it started becoming a regular part of my day-to-day online activities. Not just an occasional play thing, but something worthwhile.
Facebook has real, true value to me, one that I find it hard to underestimate. When you have friends spread over the entire globe, keeping track of what is going on each of their individual lives is supremely difficult. With just the few dozen friends I have Portland, planning a simple Pie Party via email can take days, if not a couple weeks. Facebook makes such things trivial. A simple Wall post can notify every single one of your friends that you have met someone special, had a baby, are planning a party, or any number of things. If you’re having a bad day and need a bit of cheering up, within an hour you can have six people sending you an upbeat message and even planning a fun dinner that night. Social networking is amazing.
And that is just the most basic of Facebook’s abilities. Cameron and I used to play a weekly Scrabble game online. The first photos of a friend’s newborn child were put up on Facebook. Groups can be formed supporting any number of ideas or political causes, which then can grow exponentially in just a matter of days. To say that a site like Facebook has changed our society is an understatement. This is a completely new, faster way of being connected with other people. Yes, there is a chance that one might become less social in real life by focusing so much on a digital existence, but I have yet to know a single one of these people.
Yet, Facebook and social networking is starting to leave a rather horrid taste in my mouth. Sharing can go to far. All of that digital information can be spread too easily and seen by too many. I am not talking about people sharing every aspect of their personal lives and needing to one day hide themselves from companies and colleges. No, instead, it is Facebook itself that is going too far.
If you were paying any attention over the past few years, you have heard about the numerous concerns about Facebook and its privacy policies. One of the first big controversies was over Facebook’s Beacon advertisement system. Succinctly, Facebook was partnering with various external sites to allow people to share their online activities, like movie ticket purchases, with their friends via their Facebook News Feed. Then, Facebook allowed advertisers to see this data and create tailored ads for these users and their friends. The problem was that this service was launched with every Facebook user opted-in and with no opt-out ability anywhere in one’s Facebook settings. Beacon caused somewhat of an uproar, especially when it was found out that data was not being collected exactly as Facebook claimed, and it was eventually shut down thanks to a class-action lawsuit.
Next, there are the data mining concerns that are a bit more subtle but equally harrowing when you consider the possibilities. For example, take a look at Facebook’s current Privacy Policy, specifically these few lines:
When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting.
If your friend connects with an application or website, it will be able to access your name, profile picture, gender, user ID, and information you have shared with “everyone.”
Isn’t it nice to know that any of the possibly thousands of unscreened applications or websites that your friends might connect to via Facebook will have your public Facebook information available to them by default without you giving them permission? My knowledge and experience as a developer makes me cringe at this implicit freedom of access to data. With the scantest crumbs of information, you can draw significant and in-depth conclusions about a person and their life. If you are curious, there are now tools to see what Facebook will publish about you publicly.
To be fair, Facebook has attempted to address concerns over data mining by continually tweaking and adding to their Privacy Settings. They are also continually listening to user feedback and adjusting features when they deem it necessary. And yet, the Facebook Privacy Settings seem to constantly be causing more issues than they are solving.
Facebook made sweeping changes across its site at the beginning of December. The problem? Some of the changes urged users to share everything with everyone—pretty much the polar opposite of what most people would want to do. The privacy screen that every user had to click through (called the “transition tool”) was unclear and asked users to choose between sharing wall posts, pictures, and more with everyone or…whatever you had set before. What did you previously set for, say, photos of you tagged by other people? Do you know off the top of your head without checking? Most people don’t, and Facebook didn’t outright tell you. Not only were they vague, but the default settings were set to the widest level of sharing possible.
If you are on Facebook currently, you may have noticed that every six months or so there are a new round of status updates from friends telling you to look at X or Y privacy setting and disable it. Confusion over Facebook’s Privacy Settings has led many technology blogs to write up full Facebook privacy guides to help you understand what you have the ability to control and how to change it. Further, every single new “sharing” ability seems to be enabled by default. Always opt-out, never opt-in. Maddening. Most recent example? Instant Personalization, where Facebook partner sites like Pandora and Yelp magically and instantly know all of your public profile information from Facebook. I use both Pandora and Yelp on a weekly basis. I never told them they could talk with Facebook and know my profile data. Yet, that is exactly what they are doing without my permission.
This is just the beginning. Facebook wants to go farther. The stated goal of Facebook is to evolve to be the platform that maps the “underlying graph of connections” for everything you do online. “Social plugins” for websites that will show you which of your Facebook friends are part of that site, what they have done, and recommendations for how you might use the website. The “Like” button will now be ubiquitous on the web. Any blog entry, newspaper article, band, movie, website, game, et cetera that you or your friends “Like” will be recorded and used to create a more personal experience for you on Facebook and other websites. All cleverly hidden behind the scenes—your friendly social networking Big Brother.
Let’s remember that Facebook only recently turned truly profitable and does not charge for the usage of its website. What is the foundation of their business model? Mining your data and selling it. Sorry, that is not precisely correct. Mining our data and selling it. How we interact and what we share/like is the foundation of Facebook’s business. They are building an incredible amount of data about everything we do in our lives.
Hand in hand with all of this known gathering of information, there is an even darker problem. No system is perfectly secure. Case in point, a flaw was found in Facebook’s new Graph API that exposed all the events being attended by a Facebook user, irregardless of any privacy setting. This is not the first Facebook API to have a security hole, nor will it be the last.
So, you first have to believe that Facebook will only use this information responsibly and in line with your wishes. You then have to believe that Facebook will keep this information secure. Finally, you have to believe that whomever Facebook shares this information with will do the same. I have strong, reasonable doubts on all three counts.
With 400 million user worldwide, the issue of what social networks are doing with all their stored information about our online activities is extremely important and will likely determine the direction of the entire web in the coming years. I am rather pleased that four Senators have taken action and written a letter with the aim of at least opening up discussions about the privacy concerns.
For the time being though, I do not trust Facebook with my information. And so, I have deactivated my account and insured all Facebook cookies are deleted from my browser.
My hope is that I will one day be able to rejoin Facebook and continue using it in a way that is valuable to me—sharing details of my life with friends and planning social events—without the fear that anything I add to Facebook or do online will be recorded by them and possibly learned by anyone without my permission. I do not believe we are moving towards a world where everything we do is no longer private and only that which we keep in our minds is private. Silent, pervasive tracking of our actions does not lead to a heathy society. And it is certainly not what I want.